


City on the Edge of Forever

by Patchworkearth



Category: Persona 2, Persona Series, Persona | Revelations Persona, Shin Megami Tensei Series
Genre: Better Dead Than Forgotten, Canon-Typical Violence and Death, Deliberately Inconsistent Honorifics, Dissociation, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, It's a long-ass Persona 2 story with a plot it's gonna get dark before it gets light, M/M, Obscure Canonical Details, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, fathers and sons, light cursing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-22 20:44:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 41,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12490452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patchworkearth/pseuds/Patchworkearth
Summary: Living after the end of the world is hard. Living with yourself is harder. Tatsuya Suou comes home to find not everything is where he left it... and some scores are yet left unsettled.(Or, "Persona 2: Atonement")A post-EP epilogue of the Other Side... but why are his friends still there? Why has someone new donned the Joker mask? Who are the City of Heaven cultists? Why is Kei Nanjo working with Tatsuzou Sudou? And can Tatsuya work up the courage to ask that damned boy out on a date, or what?  A story of finding a place to belong.





	1. Man on the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> I've made every attempt to keep the honorifics as inconsistent and frustrating as the game's localization.
> 
> Begging the reader's indulgence, if this scenario's premise seems in conflict with the game's conclusion, and if our hero's supposition about a character's fate seems incorrect, all will be revealed in the tale's telling. There's some twists to this one.

“ _Tatsuya... there’s one thing I forgot to tell you...” Baofu wouldn’t look at him over the trembling end of his cigarette. “There are good things even when you become an adult... Just a few...”_

_He tried to force the smile he knew they needed. “Yeah... I know...” But his persona was already pulling at him, a flare of light that seemed to swallow Philemon’s little gazebo... thing... bit by bit, like blacking out in slow motion, until all he could see was Maya’s crying face, and behind her, that masked figure himself, cradling Jun like the Pietà. He could hear them calling to him, his brother and Miss Serizawa, but there was a lightness as he felt his body slump forward without him. He started to reach for Maya, and then stopped, giving her one last promise he’d be sure to break like the others._

“ _We are connected by this ocean... we can... meet again...” And then his very self dissipated, little more than fireflies, knowing in his heart of hearts that the abyss loomed—there was no Other Side anymore, just this world, with a Katsuya he could trust to watch out for her, and his friends safe and happier for not having known him. He could let himself forget, now; and if he, if his self, not This Side’s self, was little more than memories to which he was no longer entitled, then surely forgetting would be oblivion at last._

_Here, finally, he could know he’d done this one thing right..._

_There was a feeling like falling, falling through heat and dark and time, falling at speeds incalculable, a feeling he’d experienced but once before. Images and moments trailed past him like windows of some impossible tower, and then, and then..._

 

***

 

When Tatsuya Suou woke, it was gradually, the way normal people woke; sensations out of hazy view, soft smells, a halo of light increasing in brightness. When he fully came to himself, he realized the heaviness of his limbs was due not to a pressing snarl of squamous tentacles, but in fact a single duvet—soft as air, but stained right through with his sweat. He felt hot and damp and alive in a way he hadn’t in ages.

The numbness in his fingers was gone, and with it other feelings he hadn’t realized he’d been experiencing until they were over: a dissociation with his own body, a burning in his wrist, a cracked and raw throat. He felt so _himself_ that it made him dizzy.

He fell back asleep again, without having moved, to the smell of flowers all around him.

 

***

 

He woke again, with no way of judging the intervals, and this time cognizance came more quickly. He tried flexing his toes beneath the covers, and they were slow to respond in a way that felt indescribably human. Tired. He looked at the ceiling and he recognized a stain. This had been Maya’s apartment.

That he’d thought to use the past tense gave him an instant headache, his face tightened and there was a smoky feeling, like cloth dragged over his brain, and he found himself too tired to stay awake again.

 

***

 

The third time he woke, he was not alone. He didn’t move, not at first, but he heard the soft, scratchy sound of a pencil being dragged; he let himself rest in that sound, wrap himself in the banal normality of it like a threadbare blanket, before slowly turning his too-heavy head to see. It was a girl, huddled under a sweater large enough to be a tent, a sweater pulled over her knees, as she drew quietly on a crisp white board. She had darker skin, and her face was scrunched up, her tongue out just a little—she hadn’t noticed he was awake. Without her wig, it took him a bit to recognize her.

She brushed away some eraser leavings, glanced over... and her eyes widened at the sight of Tatsuya looking back at her. “Whoa!” She started, nearly toppling out of her chair.

“H... Hey.” His voice was raspy, and using it made his skin feel brittle.

She put her things down sloppily, hurriedly. “Don’t move, okay? Let me get you some water.” Her socks were all stretched out and loose as they passed by his face, and he rolled his head back to that stain on the ceiling. Then she appeared again, a bottle in hand. “We saved this one for you.”

“Ixquic,” he hissed out, trying to sit up enough to drink. She messed with the pillows behind him so he’d have something against his back. She was something like thirteen, but she had adult eyes. They all did, now.

“Um, yeah... Akari, actually. Is my name. I don’t remember if you knew that.” She pressed the bottle into his hands. “Drink slow, okay? Sips. It’s Akari Hoshi.” He felt weak enough to comply. “How do you feel? Like, your head and stuff, physically.”

His eyes unfocused as he considered the question. “Better than I should.”

She sat on the floor so she could watch him. “You were over there, right?” He nearly gagged on the water. “It’s... they figured it out, eventually. Where you were. Everyone’s been waiting for you.”

His face felt tight, dirty. “How long?”

She bit her lip, turned away. “A couple of months.”

Tatsuya yanked the blanket away from his legs and went to stand. “Hey, wait!” she was saying, but he was on his feet... and they refused to work, tumbling beneath him, and he dropped. Hoshi caught him under one shoulder and helped him back down. There was a chill in the air: he was only in an undershirt and his school uniform slacks. He couldn’t remember the last time his feet had been bare. “Whoa whoa whoa, you can’t just... you’ve been lying there for too long, you’ve gotta go slow!”

He whipped his head back and forth. “No, I need to go.” Months. He’d been on the Other Side for months, which meant that time had just continued here? Which meant that everyone... Tatsuya could hear His dark laughter ringing in his ears.

“Nuh-uh, today’s my turn to watch you, so I’m not letting you hurt yourself.”

“Your turn?” Tatsuya willed his legs to work. He was just weak from lying in bed. If he could just get walking, he could eat something and he’d probably be fine.

“Everyone takes a turn watching you.” She lowered him back down—his rear end hit the futon with a thump. “We have to, or else Jun and Lisa would stay here day and night.”

“Jun...” He looked over to where the flowers had been left. Red carnations, pink camellias, and hyacinths everywhere. He knew their names, but he’d never been able to keep the meanings straight. He touched the bell-petals of a white heather and marveled at the sensation. It had always been Maya who’d known what Jun’s flowers had meant. A code directed at him that he’d never been able to interpret. His uniform jacket was draped over a chair in the room—Maya’s room—and there was a purple flower he only sort-of recognized tucked into its lapel. Monkshood.

When he’d been a boy, before... before everything, Katsuya had gone through some crush on a girl in his class; it hadn’t lasted that long, but he’d consumed volume after volume on flowers, agonizing over the perfect bouquet to accompany his declaration. He’d ended up catching her smoking behind the gym building or something and it had fallen through, but he’d shared more than he’d needed with little Tatsuya on his knee, because for Katsuya all affection had to be delivered via lecture.

If, in retrospect, it was now obvious that his unusual patience during those spiels was because he’d been remembering his doppelgänger admiring the flowers at Alaya, well, nobody had ever said that Tatsuya was _smart_.

“Maybe I should call him. Or Eikichi.” Hoshi was watching him, biting her lip again.

“No. No.” Tatsuya winced, rubbed at the wrist that should hurt, but didn’t. “I want to walk there on my own two legs.” He hung his head. “I want to come to them.”

“Um, well, I don’t get it, but that’s okay I guess, if you stop trying to force it.” She rustled through a plastic shopping bag. “Do you want to try rice? I don’t know how your stomach feels, but...” But it had been months, and he’d needed no IV bag, no doctor’s care. He’d slept the way that fairy tales slept. He glanced at the sheet of Bristol that she’d been working on when he woke: the costumed hero looked a little like Featherman Red, and a little like Apollo.

“Yeah. Okay.” She grinned, and went to the sink to rinse the rice while he sat with his back against the wall, feeling the twinge of a very old scar. For a moment, he considered making a break for it while her back was turned, but he knew he’d never make it to the door. He focused on curling his legs in, and then out, getting the blood moving in them again. The room was clean; he looked around and saw few traces of Maya left. The infamous mess had vanished, the way that she had. The books and underwear, the canned crab and computer parts, the fashion magazines and empty ramen cups, all the signs that Maya-nee had been a real person. The only sign left was the stain on the ceiling, an aged brown smile.

“Where’s Miss Serizawa,” he found himself asking, even though he feared the answer.

“Who?” Hoshi was clanging pots together.

“She lived here.”

“Hmmm... you know, I’m not sure?” She poked her head into view. “They only asked me to start helping after about a month, I think. Everyone’s so busy, but nobody ever wanted to leave you alone, you know? The place was pretty empty when I started. People have just brought stuff in with them.”

And he could see the signs, when he knew to look. There was a tired old acoustic guitar leaning off to one side—that was Michel thinking of him. The ordered stack of motorcycle magazines next to a half-dozen disordered martial arts ones—that was Lisa. He could hear Hoshi opening the refrigerator door and make a murmur of pleasant surprise—that was Miyabi.

Did Katsuya know where he was? Did his parents? Why had they laid him to rest here, in this monument to his failure?

 _Because you’d convinced them all that you hated your family the most,_ the wicked whisper said, and even though it was his own mind, he knew it would ever sound like Him. For months, they’ve likely wondered after him, assuming him lost. His sins compiled.

Hoshi returned bearing a small bowl, and he took it gratefully with fumbling fingers. “I know you seem pretty fine, but eat slowly, okay?” He nodded, tried to get his fingers to properly hold the chopsticks.

“Do you know anything about the neighbors?” He asked, thinking of Shiori Miyashiro. He kept coming back to this building, living here in a way that wasn’t living.

“Oh.” She put her own bowl of rice down and frowned. “Um. How much do you remember?”

He scowled. “I remember the Ameno... I remember _Xibalba_ taking off, with us aboard.” The glass doors to the balcony showed only clear sky—nothing that meant anything at all.

She thought for a minute. “Come to the balcony with me.” She helped him up slowly, and let him take slow steps (getting easier all the time) on his own, but stayed hovering in case he dropped again. And she slid the door aside for him to lean against the railing.

The first thing he saw was the other great monument to his own failure: the Taurus temple, having erupted from the ground like a giant gold pimple, the debris from what was once the charred aerospace museum littering its perimeter. It had been full of wild dogs; the place was damp with musk and smelled awful. He’d stood in the center of that building and confessed feelings he’d only barely realized, only barely understood, and then struggled to meet his eyes when Lisa papered it over with brittle laughter.

And to the northwest, a crater where his brother’s station had been. He’d last seen this Katsuya, his Katsuya, when he’d been standing at an intersection with a flaming backdrop, believing him, Tatsuya, to be responsible but telling him to go home safe anyway.

_I thought I taught you to hold a knife by its handle..._

_I'm sorry..._

_Don't say anything. My brother doesn't lower his head for little things like this..._

_No... The me of “This Side,” also feels the same way..._

He shook his head, taking in the expanse of Kounan, quiet as death; there were occasional pops, occasional shouts, but no cars moved, no throng spilled out of the Seaside Mall. Instead of the shore, Ebisu bordered a slowly rotating wall of runes, beyond which lay eternity.

“Between everything... the Nazis, the demons, shadows and aliens... King Leo,” she said the last with a hitch and a gulp, “So many people died. Miyabi told me the city had one and a quarter million people last year.” She looked small, like she was. He tried to remember how she looked hefting that big sword and found he couldn’t, despite going through it twice. “Even after all this time, we can’t get a solid number, but... it’s looking like there’s only about three-quarter million left? Which is a lot of people, I guess.” She pointed up, at their building, and he craned his head back to see a hole in the building, as if it had been punched by something massive. The walls, windows, were just gone. He could see into multiple floors worth of apartments, open to the elements, destroyed.

One of them was Shiori’s.

“Until you think about it,” Hoshi whispered, “And realize that’s all the people left in the whole world.”

 

***

 

They took it slow, had Tatsuya do some pacing around the room. Soon enough, they were both equally satisfied with his progress, that he could keep his equilibrium. They’d try walking to Sunrise and back, see how he fared.

It shouldn’t really be possible, but they were on an ancient Mayan flying saucer, so what was “possible” had stopped holding the meaning it once did. Arguably, it had stopped by the time Tatsuya had gotten to “banana char siu ramen,” which had hardly been the beginning of it.

He finished getting dressed. He’d considered going without the Sevens jacket—it felt so wrong to slip in back on, like nothing had changed—but he saw the flower in its lapel again and donned it anyway, though he left the tie behind. His thumb grazed the seam where Ulala had repaired it, where there had once been a pocket before Lisa had torn it off on that very first day.

As he put the jacket on, he noticed on the table an artifact that he couldn’t identify: a scale-model mecha unit, meticulously painted, posed in its transparent stand. He didn’t know anybody who spent time on those things; Hoshi didn’t give it a second look, either, so it wasn’t her. They reminded him distastefully of the Longinus units, and he put it back on the table with a frown.

He was tying his shoes at the doorway when the door swung open, nearly slamming him right dead-center of his helmet-hair. He fell backwards and looked up to find Chika Ueda staring at him like...

...Like a ghost. He’d probably get that look from every person he’d ever known, now, and it would be accurate every time.

“Whoa-ho-ho!” Chikarin grinned and pulled him into an awkward hug—that is, awkward for him, far less so for her, who was pounding hard on his back as if to make sure he was real. He gave her head a pat—her feathers were now reinforced with safety pins, paper clips, colorful bits of yarn. There was a patch of hair missing way in the back, only sort-of hidden, with a scar like she’d hit her head pretty hard some time back. She wasn’t in her uniform; he wondered if anyone wore it anymore. “Welcome back, chief! Chikarin can’t _believe_ it!”

“Yeah...” he managed, wishing he had ever in his life felt comfortable enough in his own body to be okay with this, the saddest irony of all to be home in his own elbows, knees, and toes and just as awkward with them as he’d been a year earlier. It was so much easier to just kill things. Rage was comfortable, at least more comfortable than this.

He itched at his wrist.

“Oh!” She slapped her forehead. “I almost forgot!” She handed a notebook to Hoshi, and winked at him. “No peeking! You’ll spoil the ending!” His brow knit, until he remembered the manga that Hoshi had been drawing, tried to smile while he was nodding.”You just woke, chief? Where are we going?”

“Tadashi’s and back,” said Hoshi with a shrug, stashing the notebook with her things.

“Roger-dodger! Let’s ramble!” Chikarin swung the door open and bowed with her arm outstretched, waving him through. Tatsuya stepped out into the hall, remembered standing there next to Eikichi the first time Maya had brought them to the apartment, remembered the anticipation of a million million fantasies, each toppled like dominoes upon seeing how she’d kept her home. Remembered the look on Miss Serizawa’s face when “Ma-ya” had come at the vanguard of a bunch of high schoolers, one of whom had a sword at his belt. His hand reached for the steadiness of that sword now, and it again found nothing but air. He looked to the two girls, who were watching him warily.

“What about the demons?”

They exchanged glances. “Not too many left, after you gave Big Daddy the chop-chop,” Chikarin finally said with a shrug. “We still see a few here and there, but it’s like wolves, now.”

“Wolves?” He tugged at his jacket.

“You wouldn’t want a kid to bump into one.” Hoshi was pulling on a jacket. “But if you keep your distance...” She scrunched up her face. “I, um... I kind of miss... y’know, a couple of them.” At his stare, she wilted. “Not that I’m not glad they’re gone...” Tatsuya remembered staring down Belphegor, the tightness of his stance, and then hearing a plop in a toilet bowl. His eyes narrowed. “Forget it,” she mumbled.

They reached the stairwell, and he had to restrain himself from going up the floors to where the remains of Shiori’s apartment lay. _Takuya lived... she might never have moved in._ He had to keep telling himself that.

At the building’s entrance, he saw that the nameplate which had once read “Lunar Palace” had been torn from the wall and thrown into the bushes. He pulled up his collar against the chill; Chikarin didn’t seem bothered. His motorcycle was parked just outside, and he placed a hand on it, felt its solidity. But he didn’t trust himself yet. And so they started walking.

It had once been a hotly-desirable stretch of property; with Ebisu along the other side of the highway, it had been sold on its view. Eventually the encroaching factories had lowered the value, and then when those died out, leaving ugly shells throughout the district, a revitalization campaign had begun, starting with the building of a museum which he’d since watched burn to the ground twice. His father had once said that “Kounan was a ward with an identity crisis.” Now, it seemed all but dead.

“Most people are further north,” Hoshi said unnecessarily. “With Narumi just... gone... I think it made people nervous.” He kicked a bit of torn-up asphalt down the road and watched the wall of runes hum past to his right. They were all of them trapped in the workings of a massive machine only partly of their own creation. Tamaki had told him once the gears had started turning years and years earlier, that everything he’d seen, everything he’d caused, had only been the output.

He reached into his jacket pocket, and his hand found the lighter. He examined it, clicked it open and closed once. “The most important things can't be seen with the eyes,” read the familiar inscription.

_He looked away from Lisa. “...I only have eyes for Jun.” He heard Jun’s intake of breath, forced himself to meet his eyes. He couldn’t hold that piercing gaze, not even for this. He jammed his hands in his pockets, turned his head. Hated himself, because it probably looked like he was trying to be cool._

The semicircular plaza of Seaside Mall looked relatively unchanged, structurally. But as they entered together, he could tell time and Hell had taken their toll here, as well. The Jolly Roger was just... gone, cleared out down to the last nail as if it too had never existed. The empty storefront appeared to be home to a family cooking over an open flame. The Sumaru Genie’s shop was more traditionally closed, and aside from one set of curtains falling over, there was no sign of distress. London’s front windows, however, had been smashed, and the trashcan thrown through them still stood upended in the shop’s center. Someone had taken a piece of rebar and planted a flag made from a single tailored suit, where it whipped in the wind. Class struggle had apparently not been left behind on terra firma.

The door to the Velvet Room, of course, was no longer there.

He came to a halt outside the familiar neon of the Satomi Tadashi pharmacy, his attention drawn by a poster that had clearly been put up only recently. In big, black kanji the poster announced a “community meeting” to “air grievances” and “work towards positive change.”

It also bore a familiar face, posing in an attempt to appear stately and composed, a task which had never proved difficult for him.

“I see you recognize our new mayor,” said Chikarin with a sneer. “You want to go? I can get you in, I’m covering it for the Free Press.”

Tatsuya stared at the poster before finally tearing it from the wall, rolling it up, and jamming it inside his jacket pocket. “I’ve never seen him without his helmet on before.”

 

***

 

The doors slid open for him automatically, and a wash of clean air spilled out all over him. He hadn’t realized how thick and hazy it had been until processed chill blasted him right in the face, nearly knocking him back.

“How is there still electricity?” he finally thought to ask.

Hoshi shrugged. “How I remember it was, after the worst of the demon invasion passed, this convoy of cars went up and down every street... it was a car, a truck, and a motorcycle... and the people in the bed of the truck had a megaphone, and they kept telling people to not be alarmed, that there was still power and clean water. And I didn’t really believe it, exactly, but I guess a lot of people did... folks were reassured that somebody was on top of things.”

Nanjo had done it all with a rumor. As fast as he could. Without having been there, he could likely place who was in each vehicle, what their roles had been. Tatsuya walked down the aisle. Like a jilted lover, everything reminded him of her. A stack of canned crab on sale; a months-old magazine ad on scuba-diving vacations.

“I’ve heard people say that there’s some electricity demon kept under the city, and they bleed him dry for it,” said Chikarin with just a _bit_ of glee on her face. “It’s too bad that they couldn’t just, y’know, say that people had enough food, or that the internet still worked, or...”

“It has to be plausible,” Tatsuya mumbled. “Hope will only carry people so far. It’s only how unreal our world is now that let anyone believe that much.” He placed one hand on one of the metal shelves, leaning as he felt dizzier. With no internet, he couldn’t imagine what Baofu...

Narumi ward was gone. Broken off and dissolved into the clouds. And on this side, they’d never met Kaoru Saga at all, not more than a brush with his younger self, there would have been no reason for him to ever leave.

“ _There are good things even when you become an adult... Just a few...”_

He felt something nauseous in his belly threaten to rise, and clapped a hand over his mouth, clenched his eyes shut.

“Hey, you okay?” Hoshi grabbing his arm, but he couldn’t feel it.

Tatsuya.... Tatsuya wasn’t even sure how many people that he remembered were dead on this side. Sometimes it blurred together. Ken and Takeshi and the third one whose name he could never remember... Mee-ho and Sheba... that disgusting class president... who else? It was hard to remember with his head pounding.

What kind of world had his friends been forced to come back to without him?

How had they come back at _all_ , if they’d agreed to forget? They were to be happy on the Other Side; how could they watch him sleep? How could they wait for him here, knowing he’d abandoned them, if they hadn’t made a better world?

What had been the point of it all, if they were here? What would be the point of it all without them?

“Maybe we’re going too fast, Chief.” Chikarin took his other elbow.

“No.” Tatsuya shook his head. His hand gripped his lighter hard enough to hurt. “No. I’m fine.” She didn’t look too sure. “I’m fine. I’ve been through worse than this.” What if he had to do this all a third time? What if that was where this led? He stood up straight, tried to ease his expression for their benefit. They were just kids, no need to scare them.

Chikarin was his age, he realized suddenly; just a year behind. When had he stopped thinking of himself that way?

He turned to walk down another of the aisles rather than look at their worried expressions. Grabbed a bottle of painkillers so that he’d have something to carry out, or because his wrist kept burning. He’d spent all that time in a world where Maya’s hands were smooth as silk, where he didn’t have a cross just below and between his shoulderblades. Shogo. That was his name. Ken and Takeshi and Shogo. He had to remember.

Remembering was all he was good at. Remembering and killing.

The shelves of the Satomi Tadashi’s were all fully-stocked, and the song was still playing. While inside, it was as if nothing had changed, as if the world were still round. The sister giggled at him from behind the cash register.

“Why do you still need money?” He asked even as he dropped a pile of yen on the counter, some of which was blood-stained—a fact which had never and would never bother her.

“The world might be smaller, but we can still rule it!” The sister scooped the coins into her hand with a grin. “In this world and the next, Satomi Tadashi’s is the center around which all your lives revolve, if we have anything to say about it!” They were the only ones left in the city who took money at all. They didn’t even bother to raise their prices; they knew they were getting it all. People paid the Seven Sisters just to be within those walls and feel normal for a bit.

He wondered if Trish was gone, too, or if she’d found a different way to bilk the needy. Maybe she sold air sickness bags to the people who looked over the edge of the world.

Tatsuya stepped outside again, and leaning against the windows was an older man in a stained suit, hugging an electric keyboard.

“I can’t see it anymore.” He mumbled desperately at Tatsuya, who recognized him. “That blue room... it’s never there when I close my eyes. How can I... how will I...” he was shaking his head slowly. “That song... it’s always like I can almost remember it, but it’s gone!”

Tatsuya walked away without answering him.

“Hey!” Chikarin ran up. “Hey, wait!”

He flicked his lighter, stared in the direction of Lunar Palace.

“Aren’t you going to see Jun? He lives _right here_.”

He turned slowly, following her outstretched arm, her pointing finger, to the building that said “Hiiragi Psychotherapy” in warm, inviting letters. Even from where he stood, he could see flourishing garden boxes hanging from windows in the second floor.

“I’m... tired.” Tatsuya found himself slowly shaking his head. “I’ll visit him tomorrow.”

“But...”

He started walking. “I need to rest.”

 

***

 

Just before getting home, he ran into an Apep, the great evil serpent of Egyptian myth. It flew a tight circle around him, and then leaned in with bared fangs. He made machine noises with his lips, startling it, and then bashed its head in with a rock and kept walking.

He felt heavy, climbing the stairs to Maya’s, to his apartment, as if gravity’s pull was stronger the further he climbed. Wasn’t that funny? What did gravity mean now, with all of humanity upon a disc that flew without direction or orbit? Why didn’t they all just float off of it into oblivion? How had that rumor never gained traction?

“ _Hey, Tatsuya, doesn’t it make you kind of... nervous going into a girl’s room? Well, here we go, into the secret garden...”_

He stepped back into the apartment and shut the door behind.

“ _I lived in bachelor housing until last year. I didn’t have any privacy at all, though, so I splurged and rented this place. It’s kind of big for someone living alone, so you came at just the right time. I mean, c’mon, this is the only place with an open room close to my workplace. Uhh, we’ll carry the living room sofa to your room afterwards. Do you prefer a bed? Oh, and if you want to watch TV, you can use this room anytime.”_

He locked the door, and grabbed the chair that Hoshi had been sitting on and jammed it beneath the knob.

“ _My roommate’s really well-organized. She’s always after me to clean up, but... Well... Who has the time? Haha... ha.”_

He slid the door to the bathroom open, pulling off the jacket covered in serpent blood.

Shiori had scrambled to pick up a shirt here and a tube of lipstick there, shoving them into a bag to deal with, embarrassed as though it had revealed anything about her at all. Maya had blushed, rolled her eyes, bitten her lip, but extended her arms wide as if to say, this is my life, and you all belong in it with me. As if to be so free of judgment, she’d expected the rest of them to be the same.

Once, crashing on her floor after a particularly exhausting run through one of the temples, he and Jun had started to tidy, if only for Miss Serizawa’s sake, in gratitude for her allowing them to stay, a group of strangers—they couldn’t have known just how lonely Ulala was, how secretly delighted to share takeout with these high school children with split lips and strange smells. Lisa had slapped their hands and sent them back to their bedrolls.

“ _To disturb a woman’s things, even her garbage, without asking..._ Fanna _! When she wakes up, ask her instead, and I’ll help, too!”_

He’d thought her mad. And now these empty walls, this empty floor, like a scraping of his heart.He yanked his shirt open, not noticing a button scatter across the floor.

They’d made Baofu and Ulala smoke only on the balcony; even though something in Maya’s laundry pile had begun to stink. It was the only time he’d ever seen his brother look at that man with envy, even with Ulala shoving him, with Maya making Katsuya blush and then giving him these strange guilty looks, like it shouldn’t be happening in front of him. Making him feel like he was intruding, when he’d wanted to shoulder the burden alone.

He inspected the old scar on his back in the mirror, sat down in the tub in his pants, and sobbed. He hadn’t cried since watching her die the first time. Not through all of the other side, not through seeing her again or everything with Katsuya or having to let Jun fall out of that blimp without him, not through seeing Him wear his own face or feeling the mark climb up his arm that first time. Not from knowing he’d damned them all. He’d been hollow, that cruel irony, that he couldn’t make his own body cry because it didn’t belong to him.

He kicked the wall of the bathtub with a stocking foot hard enough to hurt, rolled onto his side as the snot reached his lips, screaming, gagging. He deliberately slammed his head backwards into the porcelain, and his eyes went dark and then white.

Nothing hurt, not his head or his foot, not the knot in his back or the rawness of his throat, nothing as much as the burning of his wrist.

_You may flee your sins and hide yourself if you like. But you do know what will become of this world, don’t you? You marionette strung on the threads of fate, no one can escape the jaws of despair. I’m waiting. I’m waiting…_

Even gone, His voice lingered. Because it was Tatsuya’s own, the voice that lived in his darkest heart. Even with the mark gone, it was like insects boring through his skin... if he could just let them free, they could feast on him if they must, if only his wrist would hurt less.

He was pressing the razor down without remembering when he’d picked it up. Had He left it? No, maybe Eikichi, one time, cleaning up in the bathroom after spending time at his side; readying himself for a date. The metal felt cold, and then warm.The blood crawled down to his elbow like a tongue, like a black tentacle, and he pressed harder.

And then something else hot and metal had his hands, and he fumbled, dropped the blade between his legs. He could feel the clockwork grasp of Apollo’s fingers along his own, curling them in, and the old curtain across the tiny bathroom window caught fire.

He tried to free himself, tried to grab the blade or grab his wound, but the fire grew, and all he could see was flames.

He remembered the feeling, then, of Vulcanus erupting from his back, climbing out of his stab wound, like giving birth; he remembered the wall of flames with Sudou in silhouette, laughing, then terrified; fire had been his home, and Maya’s fear. Every time she got too close, it hurt her.

“ _You’re so cold, Tatsuya-kun...”_

“ _Tatsuya-kun thinks he’s cool.”_

He was climbing over the wall of the tub before he realized it was happening, rolled to the floor shirtless and seeping. His good hand fumbled in his discarded jacket until it wrapped around his lighter, Jun’s lighter. The metal was hot with Apollo’s flame—he pressed it to the wound and heard the sizzle of his own flesh.

He tripped over his own shirt when trying to stand, and hit the ground hard on one shoulder; rolled over and found the bottle of painkillers, and stuffed some into his mouth without counting, swallowed without water. And then threw them up again, all over the floor.

Baofu was dead now, too. And he couldn’t talk to anyone, not Miss Serizawa, not his brother or a bartender or Kei Nanjo, because none of them would know who he was.

He couldn’t die here, because nobody else would remember him.

And remembering was all he was good at. Remembering, and killing.

He was in his bed again, pouring water over the wound. His head felt light. For some reason, the arm didn’t hurt anymore. He just felt... sleepy. It’s what he’d told Chikarin, after all—that he needed rest.

So he did. He let his head fall back, and wondered in a detached way if he’d wake up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT: Tatsuya finally goes to Hiiragi, only to find another man sleeping there! Meanwhile, Eikichi makes a phone call, Nanjo tells a tale out of school, Toro does some dishes, and Ixquic gets lunch.
> 
> Plus: Tatsuya gets new pants! Jack Frost wears different pants! And Lisa's new boyfriend has a surprise in HIS pants! A chapter we had to call "Being There!"
> 
> ...Oh, and Joker shows up. Shhh!


	2. Being There

_The upper floor of Giga Macho was packed with kids; he even had to shove past someone in a Karu High uniform, and they were from across the river. Everyone was shouting and wolf-whistling as Meteor Masa pumped his fist, gesturing to Lisa, who looked trapped behind the glass... like a zoo animal._

_There were too many people; he didn’t like being touched like this. He saw the top of Eikichi’s blue haircut and made his way over towards it—Maya and Yukino had gotten led further up with their press credentials, but it was too hard to explain boys from two different schools following them up towards the booth. Eikichi slapped the back of his shoulder, which was supposed to feel like camaraderie, but the sudden pressure just jerked his hand towards the sword he had hidden under his jacket before realizing how insane that was._

_Looming over Lisa was the man himself, Ginji Sasaki. Tatsuya had never seen him before, but he knew him instantly, by his dead eyes and fish-lips, a face he’d seen dozens of times in a boyhood spent sitting in the plastic-backed chairs of the Kounan PD waiting room. They were wet, those lips, because he kept licking them, never moreso than when he looked at MUSES. His knuckles kneaded over each other as he tightened his fists._

_Maya was at his side, suddenly, asking him something about Sasaki, if he felt a resonance; there was something there, but the aura of “creep” overpowered everything else. Masa grabbed the mike from the producer. “Well then, let’s move on to the burning question on all our male listeners’ minds: Lisa-chan, are you single!?”_

_Sasaki’s hands were reaching for her shoulders, but she leaned in quickly and grinned into the microphone. “_ Ng Hai! _Actually, there_ is _a certain gentleman! Actually, he’s here today!”_

_The floor dropped out from beneath him, and he felt his insides fall before the rest of him. The crowd started murmuring, looking this way and that, people standing on tiptoes to look over one another. His mouth went dry. How could she do this to him? How could he not_ let _her, with that man’s sweaty forearms inches away from her? He felt sick._

“ _Whoa! Lisa-chan drops a second bombshell on our audience!” Meteor Masa pressed some keys on a soundboard. “Who, may we ask, is this boyfriend of yours!?”_

“ _He’s over there... the tall, cool guy! Eeeee, I said it!” Lisa pinched her eyes shut, vibrating in her seat. She was... enjoying this? His skin felt cold._

_The crowd started to turn in his direction..._

“ _Me?” Eikichi fanned his face, stepping in front of him. “Awww, you should’ve said so before...” He blew Lisa a kiss. “Baby be mine! I’m gonna give you a whole lotta love!”_

_Tatsuya’s eyes opened. Lisa was slamming on the glass with one fist as she shouted at Eikichi, and he shouted back. He took a shaky breath, found that the backs of his knees were slick with sweat in his trousers._

_Yukino appeared at his side, pointedly not touching him. “I’m starting to think he does that on purpose.” Nodding to Eikichi, who was having a ball tossing cuss words back and forth through the glass._

“ _My_ Chinyan _isn’t a twisted narcissist like him!” Lisa was shouting, but she was shouting at the deejay, not at him. He faded backwards into the crowd, swearing that he caught a wink from Michel as he did._

“ _So, wait, who was it really?” asked someone to one side of him._

“ _The guy’s name is Chinyan?” mumbled someone else, and he grabbed the railing that ran the room’s circumference._

“ _She’s hot... guy must be intense, though, she’s a pretty wild one.”_

_And they kept murmuring, kept whispering, even as Lisa was being led away with the others. Maya found him biting his lip, fist gripped around his lighter._

“ _We’ve got to talk about that song of theirs...” She saw him and stopped short. “Hey, why don’t we get some air?” And pushed through the retreating crowds, trusting him to follow after her._

_He was_ always _following after her._

 

***

 

The Tanabata river that bordered Rengedai no longer had a source or a destination—if anything, it was an oddly-shaped lake now, running the length of Xibalba but still, stagnant; when the worst of armageddon had passed, Kankichi Mishina had gone out on his boat and not come back for days. He’d been the first to realize, but not the last, as others joined him on rafts and rowboats, desperately fishing up everything they could before the river was too foul to support life at all. Kankichi’s livelihood, his overly-masculine vision of honor, had depended upon the pride of freshly-caught, freshly-cut fish at his counter, but there was little to be done for it—the remaining fish had to be put on ice, or shuffled into tanks where they could breed, and as quickly as possible.

So it was, that he now poured oil into a pan, whipped it around in a circle under the low heat to coat. If you’d told him a year earlier that he’d fry a fish within Gatten’s walls, he’d have slapped your face. The second night aboard the boat, he’d laid out his best knife with thoughts of ending his life. Instead, he was here, and he was trying to hold at last to the principle that if they needed to compromise to survive, he’d at least give his people—not “customers” anymore, since nobody had much use for money but the Devil Sisters—he’d at least give them a meal with some taste.

And he at least had help.

“Oooorder up!” Eikichi spun in place and then slid the lacquer plate across the counter, presenting the meal with a flourish. He gave his father a wink and side-stepped to where two regulars were chatting. He looked like a damned clown in makeup and blue dye, and the worst of it was, he was excellent at this. His cuts were clean and precise, his rolls were tight, and the guests loved it when he flipped a filet out of the pan into the air and caught it without splashing the oil. He was born for this, and he’d have never set a foot behind this counter if the world hadn’t turned to dust.

The first days, he’d worried, yes he had, dammit, he’d despaired, and he knew he’d only made it hard on his wife setting out on the river; but when Eikichi had walked in and kicked off his shoes like he’d just come back from classes, he’d been in that getup, and he’d been so glad the little freak was still alive that he’d let it all go. But it’d been months with no sign of stopping, and the boy was just... not afraid of him, anymore.

Eikichi leaned against the counter and made eyes at one of those two regulars, who didn’t look up from her plate. “Heyyyy, babe. Come here often?”

Miyabi Hanakouji dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and looked to the older man sitting beside her, anchoring the counter as he had for nigh-on two full years now. “How is the soup, today?”

“Not a lot of sharks in these waters,” Toro drawled, “But I’m not one to complain.” Kenta “Toro” Yokouchi winked at her, took a pull from the bottle of Asahi that Kankichi had saved for him. “You kids doing all right? Such hard workers all the time. The way of the world shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying your youth; it’ll end a lot quicker, now.” He did not add that he spoke from experience as a man who firmly hadn’t enjoyed his own—but Eikichi laughed it off nonetheless.

“You’re never here in the evenings, my man!” He puffed out his chest. “You can hear the great Michel perform for diners, soft music to soothe the belly and the soul!”

“Really?” Toro rubbed at his chin. “That sounds pretty good. Who is he?”

Eikichi’s face fell. Miyabi patted his hand casually while dipping a roll.

It had been part of the deal. Eikichi helping at the restaurant—he hardly ever complained about the smell anymore—and in return, he got to play for an hour or two, as long as he kept the hard rock off the menu. In truth, the remains of the world needed people preparing and serving food more than most things; he’d known coming back home was the rightest thing he could do. But reaching detente with the old man meant navigating a delicate dance of masculine ego and pride that reminded him of his own worst instincts—if he’d demanded nothing, his father wouldn’t have taken him seriously. Or maybe that was his own defensive nature assuming.

Funny how billions of dead people still weren’t enough to bridge the gap between them. Or, not _funny_ , but...

She placed her chopsticks on her finished plate. “What are you doing these days, Toro-san? I’d imagine there’s less call for salesmen these days.”

“Ah, well... an old friend called me up, a while back.” Toro rubbed his belly. “Our new mayor wanted an advisor who knew how to sell to people.”

“Really, you? Wow!” Eikichi collected her plate, wiping down the counter in the same motion. “You’re pretty important! I guess some of my charm is wearing off on others.”

“Nah, nothing like that.” Toro stuck a toothpick in his mouth. “He’s the smartest guy I know, but sometimes he needs a little help understanding the little people, you know?” He grabbed his stomach. “So to speak! Hahaha!”

The door swung open, and Hiroki Sugimoto jogged in, collected a box of delivery bags, gave Eikichi a fist bump, and then was right back out in one fluid, practiced loop.

“What, no hello?” Miyabi faked a pout.

“I think he’s afraid to look at you.” Eikichi grinned.

Kankichi leaned over, towel over one shoulder. “Boy, I’ll tell you, this kid and I don’t always get on, but he’s picked out a real winner, I’ll tell you that.” He grinned. “You can really put those rolls away, darlin’. Easy way to stay on _my_ good side.”

“I, uh, oh.” Miyabi flinched. “Th-thanks...”

“Better be careful!” He straightened, slapping Eikichi on the back. “You stick with him, before too long you won’t have that figure anymore!”

Eikichi’s head whipped around, his fist tightened. “ _Dad_!”

“Huh? What’s your problem?” Kankichi scowled. Miyabi’s hand trembled, until a single large one covered it.

“Hey, Mishina-san.” Both elder and younger turned. “You know why they call me ‘Toro,’ right?” The large man took out the toothpick and pointed with it. “ _You_ know. ‘Cause fatty tuna’s the most valuable, am I right?”

Kankichi glowered. “I didn’t mean anything by--”

Toro crooked a thumb at the door. “Hey, kid, take your girl out dancing or something. I’ve been coming here long enough, I can do some dishes for you or something.”

“Uh...” Eikichi looked to his father, than to Miyabi. “Hey, why not? Not like the world’s gonna end. Come on, babe.”

As he grabbed his things, Miyabi gave Toro a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a really sweet man, Toro-kun.”

He turned bright pink. “Yeah, well, go get in trouble, kids. And bring me back a story, the rumors these days are all downers.”

“Sounds good to me.” Eikichi swung an arm around his girlfriend. “ _You’re_ more like a little panda made from rice.”

“Shut up!” She shoved him playfully, and they laughed their way out of the restaurant.

Outside, Hirasaka continued living, breathing; despite the shadow cast by the looming Aquarius Temple, the district had suffered less than many. They stood and watched families pass by, and even some students. Kasugayama was open to both genders, now; it was packed to bursting, classes spilled out onto the rooftop and everywhere else, but it was safe. The bomb shelter had saved enough people during the worst of it that even its curse had passed. His school, finally respected in the city. It only took the destruction of every other one to make it happen.

People were filling up new residences in the Sakanoue building, and in the older lots behind the school. They were thriving, as much as anyone could on the saucer; the working-class neighborhood restored to life, and the high-class wards down south fallen into the aether; maybe the Big Bad Dad had been a Marxist at heart, or something.

“ _Are_ you taking me dancing?” asked Miyabi with a grin, and he puffed out his chest.

“Do you think you can keep up?” She elbowed him lightly and he laughed. And then his eye caught the detective agency. “Actually, give me a minute.”

She frowned. “Eikichi...”

“Just a minute!” And he scampered across the way, before she could object.

The door swung open easily, as it had every day since the end of the world. And within... there was nothing. No laundry hanging, no lucky cat statue, no MUSES poster, no carefully ordered files; no carefully _dis_ ordered files. A couple of green couches and an empty desk; a single book, a copy of _Dhalgren_ that Tamaki had been reading all those months ago, still with its bookmark bearing the Frost in an old schoolboy cap. Every time he came in, Eikichi swore he was going to take it and make a real, concerted effort to try reading it—he never did.

“Eikichi...” Miyabi leaned against the doorframe. “They’re not coming back.”

He was leaning into the bathroom, as if he expected something to be hidden in there. “Yeah, babe, I know... I was just... checking. You know.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. Tamaki and her idiot husband hadn’t been seen since the day they’d reached the depths of Xibalba. Ma’am claimed they just vanished, and had said something about advanced espionage tactics that they’d ignored.

Daisuke Todoroki had been found lying on one of those couches, arms crossed, resting peacefully, a note in one hand that had said only, “Thank you.” Jun had helped Eikichi bury the man that first week, aided along by the number of other people who were also digging graves, anywhere the earth was soft enough.

“All good,” he said with a weaker smile than before, and took her hand, shutting the door behind him...

...And on its other side was Chikarin.

“Hey!” Miyabi hugged her kohai, and also her best friend. “I didn’t expect to see you, today! Aren’t you covering that assembly later?” It was Miyabi’s day off, and she’d explicitly recommended the younger girl for the beat. She was a good reporter, but Chikarin might well be better—at least, if she could learn to spell correctly the first time.

“Uh, yeah... Yes!” Chikarin’s eyes went wide. “I should go do that!”

“Chikarin? What’s wrong?” Miyabi crossed her arms. Chikarin took a deep breath...

 

***

 

Tatsuya did not dream of Maya that night, nor Jun, nor any of his friends or the allies they’d made. He did not even dream, in the strictest sense, of Him and his black rot, his coiled limbs, his suffusing malice.

He dreamed of Kandori; and not for the first time. The foul executive who’d served as His host appeared often, darkness leaking from his empty eye sockets, the stitches of his face pulling open to reveal the tendrils beneath. This time, however, was different. The man sat calmly beneath a kotatsu as he watched Tatsuya enter the room, a living room he didn’t know; He rolled his baoding balls around in his palm, an amused sneer flickering beneath his sunglasses.

In the way of dreams, Tatsuya hadn’t much control, in that he sat down across from Kandori, as though they were family. Outside, snow collected softly on an outstretched branch.

Somewhere, a piano played a song that Tatsuya knew without knowing.

“Will you share an orange with me?” Kandori asked, nodding to the bowl atop the table. Tatsuya shook his head. “Hmp. Only man will starve himself for spite.” He took one orange from the bowl with the hand not rotating his accessories, turned it over looking for imperfections. “You can’t seem to leave me behind, a problem you most assuredly did _not_ have when we fought beneath the waves. Is it that you fear we are the same, or is it that you understand that we always have been?”

“We are nothing alike,” he spit, and Kandori cut into the orange’s peel with a long thumbnail. The sky outside grew darker, bluer; some large shadow passed by without a sound.

“I was a student once, as you were; I feel like I was happier then, though I suspect that I wasn’t actually.” His head lolled casually, he pursed his lips. “We have both of us been tainted by Him, you know; that you can’t see his mark means nothing for its lingering echo. The same might be said for your lover; we are all of us corpses dancing upon strings, hollow sacks of darkness that threaten to leak.”

What Tatsuya meant to say was “do not talk about him,” or “he is everything you aren’t,” or even “the difference is that you tied your own strings,” but he said none of these—what he said instead was “he is not my lover.”

And Kandori laughed. “From his lack of trying, or yours? You and I _are_ the same, Singularity. We are both cowards. I feared death above all, because I feared an existence without my pain to define me. What is it that _you_ truly fear? Living?”

A little girl entered from the other room, wiping at her eyes as though she’d been sleeping. She was perhaps six, but her furrowed brow was of an older woman’s; she wore a black dress and there was a red ribbon in her hair. As the light from the window was swallowed by falling rocks and ocean, the girl looked up, blinking, but seemed more scared of Tatsuya than the scenes outside.

Tatsuya shook his head. “Are you the real Takahisa Kandori, or one I’ve imagined for myself?”

Kandori collected the little girl into his lap, and she pulled a piece of the orange free, chewed on it. “Is there really a difference? Once, a man dreamt he was a butterfly and knew only its joys; when he awoke, he was again a man. Or was he a butterfly dreaming, instead, that he was the man? The distinction is but the transformation of the transient physical.”

Outside the window, in the darkness, he saw himself; for just an instant, and then gone. Or was it another with his face?

Her lips and fingers were slick from the juice; the way she tore into it was almost feral.He stared at the girl. “Who is this?”

Kandori smiled. “My daughter. You see, a child is a parent’s reason for living. Didn’t you know?”

He frowned, rather than admit his shock, his confusion. He tensed, and told himself it was Kandori, and not the suggestion of his words. “You must have felt differently, then. You and that woman choosing to die together. Is that meant to be a victory over your fear? Or over Him?”

“It was an acceptance of my role. Even when freed from the indolence of my godhood, I found purpose elusive; like a prisoner acclimated to his cell, I am unable to walk without the strings to hold me up. And so now I sit.” Kandori bobbed the girl a bit. “ _You_ claim to buck, yet you cling to your own role with fervor. What are you, without your sword? Do you fashion yourself a ronin at eighteen?”

“I have a dream,” Tatsuya lied, and felt transparent, like a cracked pane.

“No, you _are_ a dream.” Kandori waved dismissively. “And now you awake.”

And so he was, snarled in blankets, kicking and kicking, and streaking blood across his pillow with his left arm. Kei Nanjo had murmured, once, aboard a fleeing submarine: that Thoreau had said “what is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” He wrapped his wrist in bandages, sitting on the balcony and listening to the cries from above, Pixie and Tengu, Harpy and Moh Shuvuu, Cockatrice and Camazotz. The skies no longer belonged to man, if they ever had. For the skies weren’t air and cloud, but thought and dream, suspended.

 

***

 

He descended the stairs in the same filthy pants, but forewent the jacket; he kept his sleeves rolled down over the mess of his arm, and hung his tie loosely around his neck. He looked absurdly like he was off to some salaryman job, in a world where they bothered to still have them.

In the light of morning, Kounan looked bleached. There was an Orthrus feeding on something in the middle of the highway, but at the sight of him, it slowly retreated. He stood there, letting the wind slap against him for a while, deciding where to go. Every option hurt.

_I am not a coward._ He started towards Seaside, running his fingers over the burnished steel of the lighter to remain calm.

There were gradients in this sky; occasionally darkness cast by the massive, rotating rings above would cut across his vision, and then disappear. It probably only looked blue out there because the minds of the people couldn’t yet conceive of anything else. Would they travel upwards into space, eventually? Would the air thin out until they were all gagging, forced to their knees, clutching at nothing?

It was hard to think positive.

Seaside was a little busier than before; a few people here and there, the remnants of Kounan clutching bouquets of yen-bills to bestow on the Sister for groceries. He climbed through the shattered window of London, looking for clean clothes, and found only moldy scraps.

“Can I hee-help you find anything, ho?” A Jack Frost was standing in the shadows towards the back, his large eyes glowing as if in an old cartoon. He was wearing slacks.

His throat hitched, but he finally managed “You don’t have anything.”

“I might hee-have your size in the back, ho.” The burnt-out storefront felt colder. “Let’s look.”

Tatsuya stared at him.

“Or not, ho.”

“I have other clothes at home,” he finally said, turning to walk away.

“Then mayb-hee you should be _there_ , ho.”

He climbed out of the shop, kicking bits of glass out into the parking lot. He was face to face with Hiiragi.

He could feel the Jack Frost still watching him. He squared his shoulders and marched across the lot, barely yards though it felt like miles.

A set of chimes in the shape of a train set clacked together when he pushed the door open—it wasn’t locked.

Outside of Tadashi’s, the place looked the closest to how it did. It was stuffier—it looked like someone had given up on dusting all the _accoutrements_ , the bookshelves and carousels, the baskets of stuffed animals and blocks. He remembered Maya cooing over some of the old toys which now looked back at him with sad gray eyes.

The table in the room’s center, however, was still clean, and the assortment of flowers on the table was fresh, felt like home. He slid into one of those seats and tried to calm his nerves. He closed his eyes, placed his palms on his knees, and tried to feel outwards, tried to sense the consciousnesses that, like his own, reached above the waterline, like icebergs, drifting closer and farther from each other in time. There was something dark and dormant there, here, something familiar; but it wasn’t Him, or him, or her.

But he’d never been the most adept at sensing, anyway. He could feel the radiating hate of someone like Sudou or Sasaki, the cries of anguish from someone like Yoshizaka, but these casual brushes... he’d never been good at meditation, at centering himself. Easier to tinker on his motorcycle, when he needed to calm himself, because with a goal he didn’t have to deal with his own thoughts—the wound on his arm ached, and he rubbed it without thinking.

She’d tried to help him, Maki Sonomura, sitting across from him in these very benches, tried to get him to slow his breathing, to reach outward from his heart, feel the lights of Maya, of Jun, of Lisa and Eikichi and Yukino and all the others, to sense their distance, feel the ties that stretched fibrous between them. He’d start to see their shape, and it would look so much like a web upon which crawled a great, black spider with His voice, and he’d realized he was holding her hand and would let go, startled.

He’d watch her take Jun’s hands and tell him, “It’s okay, for you to feel joy,” and try to make him believe.

The strange shape of the room, the way the ceiling curved upwards—Maki had mentioned that it was like acoustics, for the sensations of Persona resonance; that her employer hadn’t even realized what she’d been building as she’d done it. Despite the toys and the dust and the disrepair, it always felt a little like what he imagined church felt like.

He saw then, the door behind the carousel, an access door leading upstairs. He wiped his hands against his filthy trousers, took a long, deep breath, and let himself in.

The stairway was cramped and not overly welcoming—it had likely once been a fire escape, or somesuch. Not creepy, even by the standards of someone who hadn’t lived his lives, but inconvenient. At the landing, though, were a collection of flowers in cracked pottery alongside the dented and splattered paint cans, and something heavy settled in his chest. He clicked his lighter.

The door at the top of the stairs was warmer, decorated with magazine cutouts of gardens and smiling students at amusement parks. The apartment had clearly been converted from office space, but this was a home long-made, before the end of the world. And when he turned the knob, the door gave, admitting him without restriction.

Despite being larger than the average Japanese apartment, it was hardly palatial; all the more so for the amount of furniture stacked up in the front room. There were armoires and drawers and bookcases arranged haphazardly, many of them stained and worn, rescues piled with the remnants of other peoples’ lives, books and knick-knacks found in bombed-out houses and piles of refuse; a first-aid kit was open on a side table, and there were plants everywhere. Not just flowers that spoke of Jun’s hand at arranging, either, though it still amazed him that he could see a half-dozen bulbs in a vase and know without knowing that Jun had ordered them; there were massive ferns reaching out of shelves and a cactus growing out of a teacup, a bonsai perched atop a collection of massive hip-high coffee table books with the names of famous artists.

He kicked off his shoes without thinking about it and stepped into the room, looking at one wall which had been taped up posters and photos and cards: images of the New York skyline, shots of a pair of newborn children, those same children as infants, toddling on weak legs. Prints of artists even he knew, like Klimt and Hokusai, and a single, large replica that Maki Sonomura had obviously taken the time to have placed in an inexpensive frame; a falling tower, a reflected city, celestial bodies out of array, and words he didn’t understand in French. He peered closer to read the print’s origin:

Suzanne Duchamp, _Broken and Restored Multiplication_ , 1918/19

Further in, the apartment opened into a wider room. There were western-style lounging chairs and a table covered in the debris of recent living; plates yet to be cleaned, a tea service, a few takeout containers atop an issue of whatever “Free Press” for which Chikarin had claimed to be a writer. There were, to one side, a series of canvases leaned against one wall, facing away from him, and a few hanging. One was of Maki herself; he’d thought it a self-portrait, but the signature wasn’t hers, the kanji was a little hard to make out from the distance, Chis-something maybe.

And on an easel, there was a work in progress that was also not her work, an awkward charcoal sketch that was undeniably Hanakouji-san. He wouldn’t have guessed the source if it weren’t for the reference photograph, a candid that only Eikichi could have taken.

“ _All I ever wanted to do was draw,” while wiping the beginnings of tears with one sleeve._

He heard a noise to his side, and turned to see that he was not alone—on a couch against the wall, there was a man sleeping. He was in a dark suit, jacket and all, his face jammed between the arm and the cushions, his arms awkwardly behind his back, one knee pulled in.

It was then that Tatsuya noticed, without it really registering, that he’d essentially broken into this house without thinking about it. Like some video game hero rummaging through people’s belongings in front of them. Like the barriers of human society no longer existed for him, now in this time after the end of the world, when privacy and security was surely a coin of highest value. Why had the door been left unlocked? As if it mattered.

In the hall leading towards the bedroom or rooms, there was a small stand with a candle and a vase, the sort one would use for a family shrine. Above it hung the Black Condor mask.

The sleeping man stirred. Tatsuya took a step back, and realized that his heart was racing.

The man wiped at his drool, scratched at his disheveled hair, and then rolled over to see that he was being watched by a home invader. He didn’t startle, but he did sit up, blinking, frowning, “Whuz?” He knew him, he realized, perhaps should have guessed. Reiji Kido worked his jaw, examining him with suspicion. “Wait... you’re the kid from the sewers.”

It took him a moment to realize that Reiji did not mean operating the valve system on the Other Side, clearing the path towards Kandori, but rather a brief confrontation in the lowest levels of the abandoned factory just a few blocks away. “Yeah,” he all but whispered.

“You looking for the one that lives here?” Reiji was rubbing his face. “He ain’t home. Probably working.”

“Do you live here, too?” he asked, as though it was his business. Reiji’s face darkened.

“What’s it to you?” Somehow, Tatsuya knew that the door had been left unlocked for this man, who’d come in to sleep on the couch without notice. To examine his feelings on the subject would take levels he did not possess, not with that mask staring right into his soul.

“Sorry.” He clicked his lighter, looked away. But everywhere he looked in the apartment, there was something with the weight of history, memory, of lives Jun was or might be living, had been for months. “I don’t... know where he works.”

Reiji was studying his face. He squinted, then fished in his jacket pocket, found a broken cigarette. He waved Tatsuya closer; he lit the man’s cigarette, wincing when Reiji grabbed his cut wrist with a too-strong grip. And then he didn’t let go for a moment, as if realizing what he had in his hand. “You’re the one he talked about, that didn’t wake up.”

“Yeah.”

He let go of his wrist, took a long drag of the short cigarette. “You didn’t knock.”

“I... Sorry.”

Reiji continued to stare at him. He... radiated malice. Not outwardly, outwardly he looked almost apathetic. Tatsuya realized suddenly, it was his _persona_ , something angry and hateful coiled around the back of the man’s brain stem. Had he sensed it before, below the factory? Certainly in Maki’s cataclysmic presence, everyone else’s resonance was dwarfed, blinded by light. He remembered this man sheepishly trying to fix his tie, scuffing his shoe when talking to Toro at Gatten. “You get that if I didn’t recognize you, I’d have killed you, right?”

Tatsuya considered bravado here, considered pointing out that taking him down was more than the Last Battalion and an army of demons had managed. But the aura pouring out of Reiji was suffocating, and when he bent his arm, his wrist emerged from one ill-fitting sleeve and his muscles were like cables. It would be at best a close fight, if it was a fair one. “Yeah,” he instead offered again, lamely.

Reiji snorted. “He’s in Rengedai.”

He nodded. “Where?”

Reiji’s nose twisted, like he’d smelled something, or bitten a lemon. “Whaddaya mean, where? Only one thing in Rengedai anymore.”

Rather than question that, he just nodded. “I’ll... maybe go there, then.”

The older man just tapped his cigarette into a glass. “He’s a good kid, that one.”

His chest ached. “Is he... okay?”

Reiji looked up, studied him again. He willed himself not to wilt under the scrutiny. He had a sudden memory of Kashihara, the real one, phantasmal and pleading above the turning clock gears. “You really don’t know, do you? You’ve been out of it since the shit.”

“Basically.” His sleeve felt damp.

“Hmm.” There was a deck of cards in his hand, and he began shuffling it. Where it had it come from? He hadn’t seen him reach for the table, for his jacket. He fanned out the cards, held them up. “Pick a card.”

He was so flummoxed that he did, without thinking. He went to look at it...

“Just hang onto it.” Reiji shrugged. “Put it in your pocket or something.” He did, without even looking, slipping it in next to the lighter. There was a long pause. “Well?”

“Well... what?” Assuming there was another part to the trick.

“Well, get going.” He waved Tatsuya off. “Sick of looking at ya already.”

Confused, agitated, filled with longing he couldn’t name, he did, pulling on his shoes and letting himself out without giving Reiji Kido another look.

 

***

 

The most notable trait of Parabellum, to Kei Nanjo’s thinking, was the smell. In contrast to the world outside, the bar had retained all of the scents it had possessed before the end of the world; fine wood, strong spirits, noxious cigarette fumes, damp upholstery, shoe polish, cloves, men, and gun oil.

He held up his glass, letting it catch the light and refract, pretending not to notice how early in the day it was for drinking. All in all, the greater number of those scents reminded him of his father. He downed the finger of aged scotch in one go, leaving the glass up-ended on its coaster, and turned to his companion.

“May I ask an uncomfortable question?”

The woman seated in the chair to his left raised an eyebrow. “Four and a half years and two wars, and you have to ask me that?”

He sniffed, adjusting his tie; bright blue, and bearing a large black numeral “1” which would mostly be hidden from view, were his jacket to be buttoned. “Is it wrong that I do not miss my parents?”

Eriko Kirishima rested her face behind one loose fist, her chin in her palm, and gave it a full, solid two and a half seconds before responding. “No, I don’t think that’s wrong. I’m not sure a feeling can be wrong, actually. But I’m hardly the expert.”

“Preposterous.” Nanjo crossed his arms. “Hate is a wrong feeling. Or... love, for a person who has spurned you rightfully.”

At the latter, she curled a lip downward. “Actions are wrong. Beliefs can be wrong. Interpretations. But feelings?” She sort of let her shoulders roll back in a loose shrug. “Is it _hate_ that’s wrong, or the misconception that leads one to hate the undeserved? Or the action one commits from that?”

“An odd position to take.” He wiped his eyes beneath his glasses. “We have seen the darkness that lies within a damaged heart up close, seen it tangibly do harm.”

“I’d argue we saw also that every one of us holds that within us.” The foot of her crossed leg bobbed a little. “I _think_ , were she here at the moment,” obviously meaning Maki without having to say her name, “That what she’d say is that it’s perfectly all right to feel that way, so long as you’ve not confused a lack of closure with anger.”

He sighed. “I confess, there are some losses...” He nodded to her, as if he needed to clarify. “Mutual losses, that are too large for me to appropriately frame. I try to consider my feelings, but they seem so gaping as to...” He made a vague hand gesture. “I am left numb. And thus, the oddest thing, is I find myself thinking about a girl I knew briefly when I was in grade school.”

She lowered the leg, sat up a bit. “Well, now this is news. Our Nanjo, with a schoolboy crush?”

“Hardly. Though, in truth...” He thought. “I was placed into her sphere for political reasons; I suspect that if other matters hadn’t... Hmp. She was polite and capable, if overbearing.” A smirk. “You remind me a bit of her, actually.” At a look, he scoffed. “Suffice to say your personality is a shade more multi-faceted, but one can hardly judge a child before they’d grown.”

“Kei...” Elly picked up her water from the table. “From you, that was almost flirtatious.”

“I am attempting to be sincere.”

“Believe me, I know.” She patted his knee. “You’re actually nervous.”

He hadn’t wanted to admit it. “Where is Yokouchi?”

“Lunch.”

Nanjo scowled. “I really do not wish to be unkind, but his priorities appear to be mismanaged. That restaurant he favors is halfway across Xibalba.” Elly frowned, if only at his failure to say “the city.” At the advent of this meeting, that kind of mistake was downright... _sloppy_ , of Kei Nanjo.

“He’s nervous, too.” She inspected her nails, still perfect after armageddon. “I suspect he’ll arrive soon enough.”

They should all be there; gathered in conviviality and reminiscence, groaning at awful jokes and trading stories of the years they’d been apart. Instead, this. He had the same thought that he always had, the one that kept his eyes open in the latest hours on dampened sheets: he’d succeeded in becoming the number one man, and all it had taken was the death of over seven billion competitors. What would Yamaoka say to look at him now, he wondered. What would “he” say to look at him now?

They’d never know. It was hard not to dwell, either, as the one who used to get him to stop was dead as well. Nanjo’s greatest secret was a collection of postcards, wrapped in printed e-mails, tucked into the box which had once held his motorcycle helmet, shoved far into the back of a limousine. They’d all told each other that they’d meet once they’d achieved their dreams, convinced that nothing in life would have cause to interrupt; instead, he could wonder if one could claim a best friend when they’d not seen each other’s face in four years, knowing they’d chosen easier paths than relive the horrors they’d once witnessed. Those chances now dashed, a circle of nine closer than blood, and a full third of them now dead.

The bar had been cleared out instead not for a reunion party, but an assembly, a planning meeting between wary men and women before they took their message to the people. And further, a trap he’d set weeks earlier, the next move he’d been playing in a chess match with the final opponent. A match where both sides had begun with far fewer pieces than they’d expected.

His dithering was interrupted as the door opened. He sat up, but rather than Yokouchi, the bar’s new patron was one of the other people meant to be gathered for this meeting. The older woman had her hair tied back and her sleeves rolled; the jewelry that Nanjo had remembered seeing every day for a year had gone missing. But at the sight of he and Eriko, her face erupted in a smile bright as the sun, and when he stood to bow she closed the distance before he could object and gave him a hug.

“Hello, Kei-kun.” Saeko Takami stepped back to arm’s length and looked him over. “You’re looking so _strong_!”

There were few people from whom such a statement would land so hard—he found himself blushing, and cleared his throat and turned away so that she could lavish the attention on Kirishima, instead. When Matsuoka placed down a coaster and a glass of water for her, he pointedly did not look at his master.

“--and of course discipline is a problem,” Ms. Saeko was saying to Elly as she found her seat, “But so many of them are deep down just so glad to have a place to go, a degree of normalcy, that it’s not so bad as you think.” The new principal of Kasugayama High School placed her feel together primly and collected her water; she looked collected as ever, but around the eyes, she’d aged more in these past few months than she had in the four years since the Night of the Mask. Arguably the strongest person any of them had ever met.

“I’d hope, with the recent policy changes in distribution, that they’ve at least been able to eat better in the past few weeks,” Nanjo offered stiffly, still watching the door with one eye.

“It’s helped, yes.” Ms. Saeko sniffed, rolling the glass back and forth between her fingers. “You’re doing good, Kei-kun. It’s going to take all of us some time.”

“As I keep telling him.” Elly did him the favor of not glancing in his direction as she said it. She had a small scar just above and outside of her right eye, almost like half a starburst—a bad hit from a Nazi stun baton. If anything, with her model’s features it looked more like a beauty mark. If Ms. Saeko was the strongest, Elly was easily the most composed, though one hardly needed his insight to know the truth of it, and whose permanent absence affected her most of all. And yet still his most trusted adviser now, in the leadership of their new world.

They’d fallen into bed together once twice thus far, and were both resolved not to discuss it.

“I expect the event today will be a debacle, however.” He sighed. “My reputation for condescension aside, we’ve not enough answers for the questions they will ask.”

Ms. Saeko shook her head. “It’s not about alleviating their practical concerns, but their spiritual ones.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’d have me proselytize, Sensei, like those City of Heaven madmen we’ve finally begun to rout?”

“No, Kei-kun...” She had that look, the patented Ms. Saeko Is Disappointed look, ever so brief, never aggressive, instantly plunging you into guilt. Nanjo suspected that dealing with her was somewhat akin to what having a caring mother would feel like. “They want to _feel_ like someone who cares about their welfare is watching out for them. People are lost and afraid. They’ve calmed down since the city took to the sky, but they’re no less terrified now. You just can’t scream forever, because your voice gives out. They _want_ to place their faith in you, they’re just waiting for a sign that they won’t be hurt further.”

He held up a hand, for Matsuoka to go to the bar and get him another drink. “They want a father.”

 

***

 

The walk back to Lunar Palace was quiet; Once, Tatsuya even had to step off of the road onto the shoulder, as a car passed. They were rare, and clearly most people had given up—or been forced to give up—on using them, especially with the state of the roads, but it was a large city, and outside of saddling a Fenrir, there weren’t many other ways to cross that distance quickly.

It occurred to him that he’d missed out on the part of the post-apocalypse that made it into most of the movies and the books; the looting, the stockpiling and battling in the streets, the flames and corpses, most of that was done with, now. And the later times, the wasteland desperation, the empty ruins and cannibals and battling for a drop of water, that was far off if it ever came. This was the boring, interminable part, the part where the survivors went on with their lives.

Some of them, apparently, even had jobs.

He’d come back for his bike, but was startled to find that someone was waiting for him on the stoop outside of his ruined building. Ixquic, Hoshi, was sketching lightly in a pad that she’d retrieved from a backpack. She and Chikarin had known where he lived; had they, too, been in that apartment? It had felt so... _warm_ in there. Maybe they’d all clustered about the antiques and the potted plants, drawing together. It was a nice thought, but one where it was difficult to imagine himself amongst them.

“Hey.” She lowered the pad, looking nervous, guilty. She had on a striped shirt and jeans that made her look as young as she really was. “Did you get to see him?”

“Wasn’t home,” he shrugged.

“Already?” She frowned. “I guess it’s pretty easy to lose track of time, without the sun.” Tatsuya did not say that Jun likely kept very good time, as he was wearing a rather well-made wristwatch.

“ _It’s ticking... It had been stopped... Ever since that day... That’s right... we promised to protect Big Sis together... forever...”_

He cleared his throat, turned away so that she couldn’t see the pinching at his eyes. “Was it your turn again?” He clicked his lighter, but he kept his right hand in his pocket, so that she couldn’t see beneath his sleeve.

“Oh... yeah, Lisa-senpai needed to switch with me.” She winced. “She needs to help with that big meeting.” Had it been arranged in advance, or had Hoshi lied to Lisa on his behalf? He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

“Meeting?” A moment later, the realization struck him. “Oh...” He patted his pockets down, but the poster was in his jacket, upstairs. “Lisa’s helping Kei Nanjo?”

“She’s sort of a celebrity, so...”

“Right. Of course.” MUSES, now a solo act at best. He felt something hollow in his stomach. “I’d like to eat. Do you want to get something?”

Her eyes went wide as he unhooked the pair of helmets from his motorcycle. How long ago had he and Lisa climbed aboard, racing to what they thought was a kidnapping, a gang dispute? “On that? Really?”

“Sure.” He held out one of the helmets. “Might be fun.”

She took the helmet. “Wow!”

He straddled the bike, looking it over. It dirty, but in the same shape he’d left it, which meant he’d hear that from the exhaust, but it’d ride fine. He had a lot of questions about how they’d gotten it here from Sumaru Prison, how in the chaos it had been left relatively unmolested, how it still had a three-quarter tank of gas, but he expected the answers were more boring than anything. And many of the people who’d come in and out of his building in the last few months had likely borne weapons.

“Hoshi-san...” As she carefully climbed on behind him, placing her legs where he pointed, wrapping her arms around him—tentatively, awkwardly, not the furious and intimate way that Lisa had insisted upon—he cast a glance back at her. “Where is my sword?”

“Jun has it.” She blinked up at him through her helmet’s visor, and he nodded slowly, not terribly surprised at her answer. He should go to Rengedai.

“Does Peace Diner still exist?” he asked instead.

She hesitated. “There’s a rumor... with so much of the perishable food gone...” She coughed once. “That samurai girl that works behind the counter... people say they serve demon meat now.”

He closed his eyes and shuddered. “Never mind.” It was just as well. He wasn’t sure he wanted to pull up to that lot in Yumezaki and see whatever was left of Anima Mundi, think about the pleading eyes of that salesgirl. Surely Lisa was difficult enough to have on his conscience for the rest of his third life.

“How about Aoba?” Hoshi seemed thoughtful. “Most of the Way was turned into distribution centers.” Meaning charity services. He grimaced, since she couldn’t see it. He could just go home for a change of clothes and a meal. Instead, this girl who fought him to the death in a women’s bathroom was suggesting he stand in a soup-line. She’d known he was awake and mobile, but came for her “turn” anyway, because she’d been worried about him; she was thirteen years old, and she’d been right.

_I_ am _a coward._

“Sure.” He revved the bike.

 

***

 

The outer “ring” of Sumaru City, formed by the twin highways which had encircled the city and connected it to the rest of Japan, had largely been destroyed when Xibalba had taken off—the walls had risen right through them, and even now they rotated as a new “frame” for the Yin-Yang shaped city. However, certain stretches were just inside the damage zone, and it was along one of these that Tatsuya and Akari raced; he darted around chunks of broken debris and stopped trucks, one of the few vehicles still moving after the end of the world.

She was laughing at the speed, but her arms did tighten around his abdomen, worried about falling off. He tried to ignore it, and couldn’t quite.

“ _Tatsuya-kun...” Maya leaned over his shoulder with a grin as he checked over the bike. Inside, Eikichi and Lisa were lowering the shadowmen who were once his friends onto the couch to get them comfortable. They wouldn’t notice—all they did was stare and moan. But Eikichi had to do something, had to feel like he was helping somehow. “When are you going to take me for a ride on that thing?”_

_The socket wrench fell out of his hand, clanging into the oil pan with a noise that felt deafening._

“ _Oops! Did I startle you?” She giggled behind one hand, watching him fidget. “Come on, it’s been_ years _since I rode on the back of a motorcycle.” She winked at him, suggesting adventures of her youth he daren’t imagine. “You should take me ‘round the block sometime... we can go by apartment and scare my roommate.”_

_He knew he was bright red; he still couldn’t bring himself to turn away from her._

“ _Maybe when this is over.” She patted his shoulder and stood up straight, waving to Yukino, who was looking over her pistols with the eye of someone who’d handled guns before, despite how she’d rejected them earlier._

From the highway, they could see all of Sumaru City, if from a low angle, and it was the first time he was seeing the scope of the damage. He could see the four temples, the charred spots where bombs had gone off; Somewhere farther north than Yumezaki, by the edge, there was a fire raging. Everything looked gray and tired.

How could he and Lisa, and Jun and Eikichi, all be in this dead city together? If they’d forgotten, they should be on the Other Side, synchronized, gone forever. It’s what he’d fought for, what all of them had fought for. Baofu and Miss Serizawa hadn’t even known them, Katsuya had barely remembered them, but they’d all fought together by the end, against his wishes. And if they’d all remembered, then the world should be destroyed completely, even this City on the Edge of Forever.

The sky rippled and pulsed; he had a feeling that nobody else noticed it. His bloody wrist did the same, and he prayed that Hoshi didn’t notice _that_.

The closest explanation to believable was the worst one, that everything after Philemon had asked them to forget was a dream, a coma vision he’d struggled through, his brain feverish, flaring, at his inability to forget. This couldn’t be the truth, he wouldn’t _let_ it be the truth. Even if dreams and the unconscious were where they, where He, made his home. Even if all of it had been real _and_ a dream, it wasn’t enough. That world had to be the real one, because it was a world where Maya-nee was still alive.

Hoshi shivered against him. The wind and the sky could be cold, at these speeds.

_He woke, at least in part, and by the darkness knew it was far too early, far too late. He’d had a nightmare, again. The shrine was ablaze, and Maya was pounding on the door, but it was Sudou standing there as he struggled to stand, but instead Jun, Jun as he knew him now, Jun in the uniform, sniffing a flower in his lapel. His hands were slick with blood, but he couldn’t feel the wound in his back, only knew that he’d never make it past Jun to the door, which kept swelling like a breathing chest, but wouldn’t give way to her desperate slams._

_He blinked, feeling crust in his eyes, and saw Jun shift uncomfortably from his place on the floor nearby; he was having a nightmare, too—the same one, probably. Or close enough to it._

_He heard the voices and tried to look without looking; the adults were on the balcony, trying to keep hushed, but three women worse at keeping quiet you’d not find in all the world._

“ _Never seen someone so uncomfortable getting touched by a pretty girl.” Miss Serizawa, with the slight slur to her voice that he’d grow to know intimately on the Other Side._

“ _Well...” Part of Maya’s retort was cut off by clinking glass bottles. “--is how I always thought he was. I guess when I was little, I didn’t exactly think of it in those terms, but...”_

“ _Ehhh,” Yukino realized her voice had raised, and paused, waiting to see if any of the sleeping teenagers had woken. He tried to remain still, which meant he was staring at Jun’s face as it twisted in pain. His chest ached. “...The way I’ve seen him stare at your tits, I don’t think it’s that, exactly. Maybe he likes both. That_ is _a thing, you know.”_

“ _Of course we know,” hissed Ulala, “But then why is he so...”_

“ _Shhhh,” said Maya, in a tone that sounded very done with this conversation. “Don’t wake them.”_

_He shivered, watching Jun wrestle phantoms in the dark._

Aoba ward looked relatively well-preserved. The Leo Temple stood tall in judgment, but in its shadow were people working and living. He hadn’t seen so many people since waking up; it was almost disorienting.

Hoshi directed him to swing his bike around the long way, past Kismet (he winced) and by the Temple to come up on the Way’s east side. People were milling around, some standing in long lines, others trying to push past. He dropped the kickstand and she climbed off, struggling with the helmet.

“I didn’t expect the crowds to get so bad... the meeting’s not for another couple of hours.” The meeting. Nanjo. Which meant, she said, that Lisa was around here somewhere. He flexed his fingers, feeling his knuckles crack.

Some of the Way was still standing as if nothing had changed—Tadashi’s, naturally, and Parabellum, and improbably even Clair de Lune; much of the rest had collapsed, and later been cleared out. Hoshi explained as they walked up that there had been a downed Nazi airship, something that had run afoul of the demons in the sky, and it had landed hard. They’d cannibalized the thing for parts and cleared out the wreckage so that much of the Way now served as an outdoor plaza, where people could partake of the food laid out and offer up clothes to those who lost their homes during the disaster.

A few kids his age gave him looks, apparently for being in some semblance of the Sevens uniform. Or for being blood-stained and filthy. Or for having arrived on a motorcycle. Or for walking with a thirteen year old girl who was definitely not his sister. Actually, there were lots of reasons he might be getting stared at.

Some people were rifling through a giant cardboard box, drawing out clothes. At a nod from Hoshi, he walked over, dug in up to his shoulders, finally finding a pair of jeans that would fit with the cuffs rolled and a padded vest that would at least obscure the state of his button-up. They had tents pitched in the remains of the Rosa Candida for people to change, and he pulled them on, trying not to look at the state of the other men inside, the spots on their skin, the naked desperation in their eyes, and in two cases the missing limbs, crudely tied off with bandages that looked as bad as his own. After checking through his pockets and jamming the lighter, the playing card, his tie, and a useless wallet into his new jeans, he threw the remains of trousers in a burning pyre at the Way’s end. He didn’t exactly feel cleaner, but he felt at least less noticed, less like a tourist of his own world.

Hoshi crooked her head. “Not bad.”

He offered her a thin smile and they went for the soup line.

 

***

 

Eikichi pushed the door open, and the first thing that hit him was the stench of blood. He held up his hand for Miyabi to wait, and stepped into the apartment.

Tatsuya was gone, but in his place was blood in his futon, streaked in from the bathroom in a jagged trail. Hands shaking, Eikichi walked slowly, taking care not to step in the smears, passing his discarded jacket, until he could ease the bathroom door open the rest of the way.

He heard Miyabi gasp, and closed his eyes. “I told you to wait outside.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t listen.” She grabbed his arm. “You’re not alone in this, you know.”

“...Sorry.” The blood was all over the bathtub, the floor, so demanding of his attention that even the scorch marks on the wall, the tattered and blackened curtains, took a moment to process. He picked up his own razor morbidly, inspecting the blade. “God.”

“He’s still moving around.” She rubbed his back. “He’s okay. And you couldn’t have known.”

“I should have been here, babe.” He was smiling at her, like it was funny. “Me, or Jun, or Lisa, we should have been here.” Trying not to think about the scariest part, that he’d walked out of the room without bothering to clean up, without thinking of the people who’d come in and out to watch over him. As if he didn’t care. Or it didn’t occur to him at all.

“It’s been months.” She placed her hands on his chest. “You can’t just...”

“I know, I know.” He bent down, grabbed up Tatsuya’s jacket. “Where did he go? Where’s Ixquic? When I see her, I’m gonna...” He felt the poster crinkle before he saw it, turning the jacket’s folds and wrinkles over and over until it emerged like a blooming flower. “Hey, let’s go. You up for biking across town again already?”

“Of course.” She grabbed his hand, entwined her fingers with his. “But what if he comes back while we’re...”

“Right.” He frowned. He’d never get a hold of Jun or Lisa at this time of day, not in a world where the cell towers had fallen into the mist with the rest of the earth. And Miss Sonomura wasn’t home today, either... He drummed his free hand on his leg, an old song he’d meant once for Tatsuya to play with him. “...Dammit.”

“Eikichi...”

He let go of her hand, started opening cabinets. “Help me find a phone directory.” He was going to hate this. He just hoped Tatsuya didn’t hate _him_ for doing it.

 

***

 

The meal wasn’t exactly filling, but it was hearty in a way that the rice of last night hadn’t been. He scraped the paper bowl clean with the last bit of his bread crust, shoveling it into his mouth. Hoshi was less enthusiastic for hers, but she’d at least eaten to the bottom—all-but-literal beggars, after all, couldn’t be choosers.

“Tatsuya-senpai...” Hoshi watched the crowds, rather than him. “Can I ask you why...”

“No.” He tossed the bowl into a nearby drum and wiped his hands on his brand new jeans, which was to say his hand-me-downs from a stranger.

“Okay.” She looked down, searching for a different question. He sighed, taking hold of his lighter.

“Did your parents make it?”

“Yeah.” She nodded slowly. “They’re busy, a lot... helping with reconstruction, and all... we’re better than we used to be, but we still don’t really want to deal with each other much. I think they figure, since I’ve been so independent, there’s no point in getting too involved now. But I still go home.”

“I guess that’s... good.” He clicked it once, twice, then: “Do you have siblings?”

“No.” She laughed, sort of. “Guess that’s not a surprise, huh?”

“Guess not.” He stood up from the twisted guardrail where they’d been perched to eat.

“ _Hey... Do you know that your brother is saving money from his paycheck for you?” Baofu pointed at him with his cigarette. “Amano went through a lot, just to see you... She was even marked for death by a Joker because of that idiot there. Haven't you done enough all by yourself...?”_

_Clenching his fist so tight that his nails dug deep into his palm, one arm heavier than the other with the weight of His mark. Turning to Katsuya. “I’m not... your little brother...”_

“ _What the hell do you mean!?” Katsuya ripped his glasses off to look him direct in the eyes. “You_ are _my brother! No matter what!”_

He stretched one leg out, then the other, ignoring the way that Hoshi studied him. “You said Lisa was helping with this community meeting that everyone’s here to see, right?”

Hoshi nodded. “The meeting’s being held down the street, at Sumaru TV. One of those big studio rooms, I think? She’s probably over at Kismet now, getting ready.”

“Kismet.” Maya’s office. If for no other reason than to make him uncomfortable, of course. They both started walking without talking about it, in the general southwesternly direction of both buildings. He thought about asking Hoshi about her manga—her and Chikarin’s manga, apparently—but he recalled the image he saw, of the red hero, and decided against it.

The crowds grew heavier as people started congregating towards the television station. Tatsuya had a sick moment where he wondered if this was all the people that were left, but he knew that it wasn’t true, that far more people would have no interest in politics, not even the leadership of the last living city. They’d drink or clean, fight or play, work or dream, and wait to hear the results afterward, so that they could gossip. A city quite literally aloft on rumors.

He kept glancing over, upward, at the Leo Temple, the massive round building jutting upwards at an angle like an arrogant chin. It had been full of His type, dark wizards and genocidal soldiers, a building of hatred and emptiness. And at its center was another him, another Tatsuya, like a parody song or a boardwalk caricature. “Like a sense of oppression,” Lisa had called his radiating aura. Like Him.

“ _I said that Leo is fitting for Tatsuya. Don’t you think, Lisa? He’s strong, free, and won’t be tied down by anyone...”_

“ _Why, I bet that deep down inside, you actually hate Jun...”_

“ _Tatsuya... I deserve your hatred... I don’t mind if you hate me...”_

It would be so much easier if he had that strength, to be able to carry that guilt on his shoulders, as Jun had. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t bear Jun hating _him_... His shadow had been empty, dreamless; Lisa had called it a robot. Hollow and walking, like that stupid statue of Hanya, no less nothing for having saved lives.

At the intersection, he paused (hesitated). No matter which building he walked towards, he was liable to bump into _somebody_ that he knew, which meant that he either had to choose, or lose Hoshi in the crowds and flee on his bike. He realized with some relief that even he wasn’t so far gone as to do the latter, and at that thought decided to press advantage.

“Screw it,” he said, and stomped forward, storming into Kismet Publishing’s revolving doors as if it were a dungeon to clear.

 

***

 

Lisa Silverman was drinking from a canned tea and watching adults argue, a pastime that was becoming achingly familiar.

Apparently, important Kismet people with important jobs were having important lunches in the Yamanote Circle when the world ended, and so the most senior editor in the building was left in charge of the remaining living humans and their right to freedom of press and expression. A short, angry woman named Mizuno, she was probably not who anyone would have chosen, but she at least took the role seriously—which meant that she was the perfect foil for Lisa’s “manager,” a man who steadfastly refused to act like he took a single _thing_ seriously.

“Look, here’s how it’s going to be.” Hidehiko Uesugi put his feet up on the staff desk, his hands clasped behind his head. “Lisa will introduce the big cheese with a smile, and she’ll make a little joke about her daddy dearest being on stage, and that’ll be about it. Folks want to see a familiar face put ‘em at ease, if they wanted a performance they wouldn’t have _you_ up there.”

Mizuno cuffed his head, sending his trademark Terrible Hat flying. “Nobody’s asking for her to sing! She can introduce each of the members in turn!”

“Ehhh, the mayor needs to not look like he’s using a teenage girl as a prop, if you ask me. And I should know, I knew him back when teenage girls used _him_ for a carpet!” He laughed, though nobody else in the room did. Lisa looked at the clock on the wall and wondered where the Hell Chikarin was—shouldn’t she have gotten here by now?

After the end of the world, Lisa had felt the need to do something, anything; she’d sat at Tatsuya Suou’s side day in and out, across from Jun, wringing her hands, and she’d started to crack up. Sheba and Mee-ho were dead, and nobody even remembered them, their very souls burned away inside a crystal skull lost somewhere in the depths of Xibalba. Eikichi had walked out of Hell with his heart’s desire and a renewed courage, and she’d had nothing. She’d gone home and sobbed on her father’s shoulder for a day, and then dedicated herself to helping the city to recover. She wouldn’t, couldn’t let it beat her.

She’d gone down to the Way to ladle soup, and people kept crashing through the crowds to ask for her autograph. It had been so stupid; they couldn’t remember two-thirds of an idol group that had only ever performed one set, but they knew her face from a poster where she only appeared in silhouette. People were so stupid that sometimes it made her sick, but they were all she had; and apparently she was all _they_ had, a place for them to put their dreams. Always, forever, looking for someone outside themselves. Well, maybe she could relate to that.

“Brown,” as he insisted his friends call him, had dropped in on the food-lines one day and asked for thirty minutes. He was a little something-or-other, but not a creep like Sasaki had been, and while she might not have given him the time of day if she hadn’t remembered he was Elly and Yukino’s friend, he’d been very careful since that day, didn’t so much as touch her shoulder if it was from an angle where she couldn’t see it coming in time to turn it down. And his jokes were awful, but they weren’t gross, at least not when he thought she could hear.

“They come up to you like Mother Mary,” he’d said, and she’d been unable to deny it, the crowds around her soup bucket growing by the day. And he’d walked her down the block to a street corner where one of the City of Heaven cultists was preaching to a crowd matching in size.

“I know this is a sore subject or whatever,” he’d said, “But you might want to consider performing again. Anything’s better than this.” The thought had made her sick, this dream she’d denied, that her friends had longed for and lost, but listening to the ravings she’d shut her eyes and agreed. And then he’d said that in a world of no money, maybe “manager” was the wrong word, but somebody should help coordinate, help keep the throngs at bay.

“Maybe you can ask your dad?”

She’d given him a wry look. “Why bother, when you already did?” Men always assumed she was stupid. The old perverts with the wandering hands, the classmates who were voting her into Miss Sevens before the contest was even started, even—she suspected—her teammates, sometimes, though they didn’t even realize it. She wasn’t stupid. Her English was garbage and she’d been too focused on all the wrong things, but she knew she could be clever when she tried.

Deep in a drawer at home, she kept an old poster of Jun’s mom that Brown had slipped to her; she looked at it often, because she knew how easily she could become that woman, how she had to fight the urge every day.

She was in her white MUSES getup, with its tight leather pants and over-itchy top, and so she didn’t like moving around too much when she didn’t have to. She pitched the empty tea can right between the two adults and into the trash bin behind, which earned her a stern look from Mizuno and light applause from Uesugi-san, who’d never met a bad impulse he couldn’t encourage. Around them was the sound of typewriters—they kept only one computer, for editing and layout, and there were boxes of spare parts for the thing scattered around the _Coolest_ offices. Mizuno had traded candles and the worst of her tinned food for parts all around town during the first week, when nobody thought a computer would ever be worthwhile again, a power play which had probably earned the new mayor’s respect.

The staff were trying to focus on their work, a collection of former _Coolest_ writers, student writers, authors, and one formerly-retired news anchor, anyone left in the city who could keep the fourth estate in motion. Yukki came by with rolls of film every couple of weeks and then would vanish again. Miyabi and Chikarin were two of the best reporters on the figurative payroll—even if Chikarin did keep insisting they should add comics pages for which Mizuno hadn’t the resources—but everyone was pushing themselves to do their best.

And she was so proud of her dad. She couldn’t quite _admit_ it to him, but she was.

“How much time do we have?” She asked, even though she’d just looked at the clock. Sometimes time was funny on the floating city.

“Long enough, but we should probably get going. “Our Fearless Leader is probably a wreck. I’d bet he’s tugging that scarf so hard his eyes are bugging out.” Brown laughed again, and Lisa rolled her eyes.

That feeling just before showtime, which she couldn’t bring herself to call “butterflies.” It had only been a few appearances here and there so far—she didn’t want to come before the crowds too often, didn’t want them whispering like she was some kind of... well, the word “idol” was already loaded, but... so once at the Way, once at the remains of Giga Macho, which had become a four-floor tent city; once at Gatten with Eikichi on back-up, which had been an absolute disaster. It was harder to find venues with the crowds growing.

Brown kept suggesting Rengedai, but she wouldn’t allow it.

Mizuno grabbed her briefcase and smoothed down her pinstripe suit. “Well, let’s all go get yelled at by the masses.”

“ _Houshounah_ ,” she mumbled, kicking herself upright. “Oh, wait, where’s...” She turned away from the elevator, and so she didn’t see the doors opened, only heard the whispers from within.

“--end of the world and you still want to use the elevator...”

“Still works.” She froze, not looking. Not imagining. Not believing.

“Maybe you just have a death wish,” asked Hoshi, that was definitely Hoshi, and she slowly turned around as the other voice’s owner struggled with how to respond to that charge...

 

***

 

The first thing that Tatsuya noticed about Lisa, absurdly, was that she looked good. In fact, she looked better than she had before the end, looked more like the Lisa of the Other Side. She’d always been an attractive girl—that had certainly never been her problem—but there was a color and a fullness to her face, to the midriff she was displaying in her idol outfit, that she hadn’t had months before. He wouldn’t have been able to put it into words before the Taurus temple, what exactly it was, but now he knew her, more of her, and how some of that slender figure had once been drug-related.

He remembered her appearing before him at the Sevens bike racks, holding what he’d thought was a confession-note, shaking, and how he’d felt like a caged animal. He remembered taking her hand beneath the city and telling her how much he still valued their friendship.

He hesitated. He took a step forward, as she turned to see him, and they both struggled for words.

His mouth opened to speak.

She reared back and punched.

He fell back, crashing past Hoshi, into the particle-board divider wall next to the elevator, and his eyes filled with blossoms of white and black and gray. He’d seen films, he’d expected a slap, knew he deserved this punch and more, but when his trembling fingers reached his face he knew that the pain in fact signaled a broken nose.

“Hey!” Hoshi yelled, ignored. Some of the staffers in the room shouted, some stood, as the beloved idol knocked a boy down with one punch.

Why had he thought Lisa would be the easiest one to face? No complimentary reason, he admitted to himself long after it was far too late, after Lisa had closed the distance and grabbed him by the collar.

“W...wait...” He managed, before she punched him again. Punches she’d landed on Nazi death machines and demons from Hell. He spit blood and wondered after his number of teeth.

“ _How could you!_ ” She had his shirt in both hands, was shaking him as if it would clear the ringing in his ears. “You promised us! You promised _me_! _Kehhei_ , weren’t we _enough_ for you?”

Then again, maybe he’d done this on purpose. Maybe this was what he’d wanted.

“Cool it!” Brown grabbed Lisa and pulled her back.

“ _Ng Hai_! Let me go!” She struggled against his grip, but the older man just tossed her back into an office chair.

“I said _cool it_ , kiddo.” Brown gestured at Tatsuya’s face, which was wet, chunky red from the eyes down. “You’ve said your peace.”

“Like _Hell_ I have!” It was only then that he could see her tears. “We could have fixed _all_ of this!” Her legs kicked in the seat, and he had a sudden vision of her in a blue dress and a pink mask, furious that Eikichi didn’t want to be the Baby that week. “We could have saved _everyone_!” She clutched her chest. “How could you let us choose to do that!” Her legs dropped, and then so did she, down over her knees, gasping for air between each word. “Why did you make us promise? I didn’t want to forget... How could you be so cruel...”

“What is all this?” Mizuno was trying to shout, but Brown held up a hand to shut her up.

“Lisa,” he tried to get out, but with his nose and the blood it sounded like “eev-ful.” If he was crying, his face was too swollen to feel it.

“Pfft.” Brown shook his head. “Y’all are still kids.” He looked up at the one-time TV host, uncomprehending, as Hoshi tried to help him up. Brown, for his part, was running his hand through a knot of hair normally covered, looking at something neither of them could see. “You’re eighteen and you think you know everything. Been there, but it’s not cute anymore.” He crouched down to look Lisa in the eye. “You guys love each other, right? Never met an eighteen year old who couldn’t take their pain out on the whole world with a word and a dirty look. Never too late to fix it.” He stood, wiping his forehead. “Give me a break; were _we_ like this? Oh yeah, we _were_! Mark busted Nanjo’s gob real good!” And he started laughing at nothing.

Hoshi walked him over closer, and when he shook her loose he sunk to his knees in front of her. “ _Sorry-ia_ ,” he tried, bowing down to touch his forehead to the floor.

A tiny laugh escaped her mouth between shaky, wet breaths, and her hand went through his hair. “That was one of the easy ones to remember.” She pulled him up gently by that grip, until he had to hold onto her chair to stay up. “Oh, _Chinyan_ , what did you do?”

“Something terrible,” he said honestly.

They stared at each other, and Brown coughed. “So long as I’m butting in...” He glared at a staff writer who was gawking. “Sit your ass down!” He waited until the man had complied, then: “You never know what you’ve got until you lose it, kids. Life’s too short.” He grabbed his Terrible Hat from where it had been flung and screwed it on tight. “We’ve all of us got folks we wish we could say things to, but it’s too late.” And then he mumbled something that sounded like “She had kids, it wasn’t right.”

“ _I mean, you were only dogging Tatsuya ‘cause you were after the same status that you hated everyone else exploiting you for! You’re desperate for someone to lean against, but you don’t believe in anyone!”_

“ _I won’t let anyone tell me how I feel. Tatsuya’s feelings are his business. But my feelings are mine...”_

Her hand on his cheek, he felt warmth that had to be Venus, held his nose in place as bits of him tightened. He’d still need a bandage over his face. “You look great,” he said.

“This is what it took for you to notice?” She smiled bitterly, wiping at one eye.

“Lisa?” They both turned at the new voice. A boy their age, on the shorter side, in a tight black t-shirt and a pair of glasses with ugly square frames. Coming from the back office, holding a white purse that had to be hers. Short black hair, a good chin, and muscles in his arms that Tatsuya recognized, muscles like his own, Eikichi’s, muscles with more function than definition, muscles from fighting with skill unpossessed. His persona shivered at the resonance; not fear, not like Him, but something else, unsettling, like _déjà vu_.

Lisa smiled at the sight of him, still working back and through the tears. “Hey, Ta-chan.” And Tatsuya’s blood ran cold. “Look who’s awake.”

“Tatsuya-kun.” The boy had an uneasy smile as he approached. “You’re okay.” He stood, slowly, his head tilted in lack of recognition. The boy held up his hands. “Whoa. Hey. I know. And I wanted to say something to you, too.” He bowed low, and when he came back up: “I know we haven’t always seen... eye to eye... but, I just wanted you to know, I regret a lot of the things we said and did back then. I’m glad you’re back.”

He looked down, and saw that Lisa was holding this boy’s hand, holding it the way he longed to hold Jun’s hand, and looked back up at this face he didn’t know, squinting, trying to process; something felt very wrong and sick, and Hoshi’s face off to one side only looked hopeful.

“Who are you?” he asked, already knowing how the question would be taken.

Lisa and “Ta-chan” looked at each other, uncomprehending, and then back at him. “Tatsuya-kun...” Lisa sat up straighter. “You don’t remember him?”

“You’re not just saying that to be cruel, right?” The boy touched his chest. “Look, we’ve had our differences, but that’s not funny, not after everything we...”

“Who are you?” he demanded again, his voice tighter. Remembering the model in his apartment.

“It’s me, Tatsuya-kun.” The boy looked hurt. “Takuya... Takuya Miyashiro... Ta-chan.” He shrugged helplessly. “The... _Blue Swan_ , y’know?”

The world started spinning. Or rather, their world was constantly spinning, and it was like he now rotated the other way, trying to fight the centripetal pull, like all of the world’s turning was pushing him back, back. He stumbled

“Whoa, hang on.” Takuya held out his hands to stead him. “You got him pretty good, Lisa.”

“This isn’t possible.” Tatsuya tried to grasp at nothing. “Something’s wrong.”

It was then that the room exploded.

 

***

 

_// Night Beast_

_// Grab my right arm_

_// Smiling like you got all_

_// Koware kaketa black box daite_

An eruption of flame, so sudden and so forceful that all of them were flung back, desks were overturned, papers disintegrated, and he saw in his periphery Lisa hit the wall and tumble.

_The museum burning twice, the pounding on the shrine doors, pain rippling through his back like his soul came out with the knife..._

A fireball on the side of the office which faced out, glass spraying in all directions. A sound like the world ending again, and the screams of the building’s staff the citizens lost, some scattering, some motionless, one burnt to dust before his eyes.

_// Hidden fear overwhelms_

_// Mustn't go back, no control_

_// Shimetsukeru inner soul kataku_

His every muscle groaned as he came up to one knee, wiping at his eyes. He looked down at Hoshi, who was moaning and struggling to get up, and then looked up to the cause.

“ _Tatsuya-kun... Run! You have to run!”_

Amidst the burning walls, with a backdrop of Sumaru City below, the wind rushing into the high-floor office with nothing between them and the fall, stood a man in a heavy trenchcoat, holding a sword.

_// Save me from that bloody destiny_

_// How do you feel seizing me now?_

_// You made me like this_

He had a paper bag over his head.

“No...” Tatsuya managed.

Joker.

Beside him, Takuya reached behind him and beneath his shirt and pulled two bright pink impossible pistols from the waist of his pants, aiming them at the sudden intruder.

_// From that bloody destiny_

_// Oh God you can't_

_// Let me down_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT: Tatsuya vs. Joker! Tatsuya vs. Katsuya! Tatsuya vs. Nanjo! Plus, Jun and Anna have a terrifying run-in with a stranger, and we learn: just who is Takuya Miyashiro? The Joker's face revealed in an action-packed "Double Creature Feature: The Killer / The Mummy Returns!"


	3. Creature Double Feature: The Killer / The Mummy Returns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lengthy delay; these chapters take a very long time to write, particularly when--as you can see--this one is as long as the first two put together, and then some. The next one may also be long, but following that, we'll be doing much shorter chapters until at least the climax. Phew!

 

“ _Y’know that ‘thermodynamics first law’ thing?” Sudou gestured with his sword, let it hang lazily in his hand. Tatsuya matched him sidestep for sidestep, his own wooden blade held before him. Somewhere down below, the music pounded, making the floor pulse with a heartbeat. “It’s all, heat an’ energy, there’s only so much of it t’go around and you can’t change what all you got. Get it? There’s a fixed volume’a’ energy in the universe. It’s all just gotta diff’n’t form. That’s how it is. This fate shit’s just the same. You got one guy who gets to be all happy, so another guy’s gotta be unhappy t’make up for it.”_

_Sudou’s feet were bare, save a few scraps of paper that had once been slippers. He moved like an animal, hunched; the hospital gown beneath his heavy coat was stained with blood and gin. In the shadows of Club Zodiac’s labyrinthine back rooms, he seemed to fade in and out of reality as he moved. “Like the meals you eat, right? You throw away what you can’t polish off, right? In return, some asshole starves to death somewhere else inna world.”_

_He shook his head, hand firming around his hilt; an all-too-familiar tic, hearing the “denpa” whisper. Had he been like this in Mr. Kashihara’s care, even then? Had the words in his ear curdled his hatred for his father into this malice from the beginning? Tatsuya’s eye drifted to the mark curled around his forearm and wrist, wondering how long it would take._

“ _Ahhh, I get it now. The voices are amazing._ Voices _! That broad’s kid brother, he was_ your _stand-in.”_

_Shiori’s firm grip on her P230JP wavered for a moment before straightening. The stillness in the air was such that he could hear the hitch in her breath, that it expelled to the side because she’d chomped down tight on her own lips. She’d be tasting copper for hours._

_Sudou started laughing again, that high-pitched pig’s squeal that he could hear whenever he closed his eyes. He’d known that laugh for most of his life. He tried not to rise to the bait, and yet he did nonetheless. “My... stand-in?”_

_The laughter suddenly stopped short. “That day you little shits changed your fate and ran off with your tails tucked, he got axed by me in your stead. You get it, right?”_

_He got it. He didn’t dare look back at her face to see if_ she _got it, if the pistol was now trained on him instead of Sudou. Tried not to shake, but the tip of his sword told him that he’d failed._

_There was a series of chimes, and Sudou withdrew a cracked and grimy phone from his jacket pocket. It was playing the theme to Phoenix Ranger Featherman R. He glanced at it, then winked at Tatsuya._

“ _Incomin’ phone call. I got an order to kill Maya Amano.”_

_Tatsuya screamed, and Apollo burst forward in flames, colliding with a malevolent dark persona from Sudou, tentacles and hatred that he knew like his own body._

 

***

 

There was a quote by a western writer, one found for him by Maki Sonomura, that Jun Kurosu had painstakingly copied again and again, in the calligraphy that his mother had once taught him in better days; often enough to learn it by heart, until he was satisfied enough that he could transfer it to a wooden ema. On its opposite side, in far cruder hand, he’d drawn two teenage boys, one holding a flower, one a motorcycle helmet, with a palm tree between them.

When at last his ema was finished, he’d walked the long walk from Kounan to Rengedai, with Maki at his side. They did not talk, and did not have to. More of the burning was being done, then, and they’d passed the crowds of weeping families, of children racing from group to group looking for the missing and the lost, all drowned by the roar of still-operating digging equipment. All the way to the Alaya Shrine, which was still and as sparsely-visited as it always had been. A few people were offering their prayers, and Nishitani-san was there as she’d always been, but far more had decided that the gods had abandoned them when they’d taken off and left the world to burn. Maki waited quietly, patiently at the torii as he walked the rest of the way.

To hang the ema, in lieu of ribbon he’d carefully removed the frayed and rotten cord that had once held the Black Condor mask to his face so long ago and wound it through the hole at the top of the wooden card. It was this that he had tied up so that the ema could hang amongst the others, the other prayers and promises. The quotation was not quite a wish, but kept the feeling of a wish as it lay in his heart.

“ _Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us—grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends.”_

\--Susan Sontag, _Regarding the Pain of Others_

And then he’d gotten to work.

Now, today, the burning had slowed to numbers less staggering; never ceasing, but so much of the land was now full. And of everyone, it was Jun Kurosu especially who’d become the island ward’s caretaker. For Rengedai was now the resting place of the last of humanity’s dead. An end-to-end field of shrines and ashes, a grave garden tended by the one who killed them.

Jun tended to work from just after dawn to dusk, most days. He’d weed by hand, replant, and refresh the bouquets that had died out. He didn’t have to do all the mowing himself, there were other men, larger men, for whom this task also gave solace—an elderly man named Haruto came out nearly as often as he did, with a rickety old rider that he’d take on a lap of the most open areas with a bottle of sake between his legs, so often it never even had time to grow. Jun would hear the old machine as it passed, always on the verge of coming apart in motion, and close his eyes, imagining a pair of lips emulating the sound with perfect pitch.

Others were less frequent. If tending the garden was the only way Jun could live, could let himself face the light of the absent sun, the pain of it was in some certain others so great as to hold them back from regaining their life.

So it was that when the shadow fell over his crouching back, he did not expect to see Anna Yoshizaka, her sleeves rolled up, a shaved pair of leather work gloves stained green around the fingers.

“...Hey,” was all she offered in response to his unspoken question, as he stood and brushed his knees.

“Yoshizaka-san.” He nodded, unsure what to say.

There was a part of him that remembered appearing before her in an antiseptic room; her elbow crooked around the bar she’d meant to be leaning on as she retrained her legs to work in tandem, instead on the floor with her heavy mascara tracing jester-lines beneath her eyes, already matching his new face. It was a part that he viewed from the outside, in third person. His memories for so many years a box of snowglobes resting awkwardly half-on and half-off a table in a dark room. When he kept focus, he could sort through them, but a single tremor sent them all into static.

“Do I need to pull these?” Anna pointed to a clump of yellow curling up from around the back of one stone monument. The serrated leaves and violet bulbs were instantly familiar; he rested one of the latter in his hands—it looked like kissing lips.

“ _Prunella vulgaris_ is a common enough weed,” he nodded.

“I thought it looked pretty,” she mumbled, and went to grab it low on the stalk; he gently stopped her hand.

“More commonly, we call it ‘Self Heal.’ It’s actually quite edible.” He let the weed slip from his fingers. “Perhaps we can keep an eye on it, let it grow.”

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, looked away. He had a warm feeling; she was not unlike Tatsuya, in a number of ways. Though... maybe some part of him had sensed that, back then. Searched for it. She was a little bit of all of them, really; her name even spelled almost the same as Eikichi’s. He’d been reaching out for all of them.

“How is Katayama-san?” he finally asked, judging how long to leave her to her own thoughts by the rhythm he’d found with Tatsuya in those final weeks.

“She’s frustrated with me.” Anna didn’t turn. “But she won’t say it. Won’t ever let herself be angry at me.”

“She sees a purer you than you can see.” Jun closed and opened his hand, once, feeling the weight of the watch around his wrist, and of the katana sheathed at his belt. He’d never drawn it; at the rare demon attack he had other means of defending himself. But he kept it at his side always.

“S’like I’m in a glass box for her to look at, perfect.” Anna shook her head slowly. “I’ll run out of air if she doesn’t let me out.”

“If she did, would you run?” Jun had no right to ask her. The things that Anna hated in herself didn’t begin with Joker, but it was how they’d taken over, like an ivy coming up through her throat, growing until it had filled her, bloomed out of her mouth. He’d planted so many seeds in Sumaru City, in designs he’d been told, and watered them unknowing, unfeeling.

She still answered him, though, with a shrug. And they both started walking, unprompted, down the rows and rows of stones. From a great enough distance, Rengedai still looked like a city, only in miniature, the markers of the dead clustered in rows so tight at times that you couldn’t see past. And yet with so much more room to grow, for the dead yet to come.

Not everyone had been cremated, there had been so many, there were still so many being found. Some had been tossed off the edge of the world, to fall forever or drift.

His eyes fell, casually, on the monument being constructed on what was once Honmaru Park. A large, abstracted tower, upon which would soon enough be inscribed all the nations of the world that had been lost.

Anna lit a cigarette (Jun’s eyes couldn’t help but draw to her plain Bic lighter for a moment) in silence, and it hung from her lips as she pulled her gloves off. She was in a plain button-down, but her seemingly-permanent indigo scarf was still draped over both shoulders and down her front like a liturgical stole. He thought she must be warm often, wearing that, and wondered if Noriko had given it to her. He was in khakis and a white shirt, which for all the world resembled nothing so much as the outfit he’d worn as a boy, playing in the grounds around Ayala and Iwato. Days he couldn’t stop reliving.

“Did you come to the garden today to get away from her?” He always called it “the garden,” not “the cemetery.” She didn’t answer; instead, she picked up the pace, walking quickly down the aisle, and he almost let her until he realized she was not moving away from him but rather towards something else, something happening down towards the center of Rengedai.

Seven Sisters High School, like much of the ward, was long gone. The work of clearing out the rubble had been the first week, though if you knew where to look you could see patterns in the plots where some of the walls had once been. What had been largely untouched, however, was the courtyard which had once marked the school’s center. That plaza remained, repaired, and outlined with benches for the visitors to rest, contemplate, or summon the strength for the long journeys back to other wards. But where once the Narurato stone had stood, emanating its peculiar magnetism and waiting for the cosmic alignment which would give it a purpose, there was now a statue. The figure of Maya Okamura, with one foot astride a fallen stone not unlike the Narurato itself, gaze upward and outward towards the uncertain future.

To most of the people of what had been Sumaru City, Ms. Ideal was the sacrifice that had saved them, her death ensuring the safe flight of Xibalba as the rest of the world crumbled. The truth, as Jun well knew, was more complicated; and he every day came to labor beneath this towering replica of the woman who, mad or no, had loved his father more than he had. It was from this statue that the city’s infinite clean water sprung; ducts beneath the eyes leaked out water pumped from the impossible Silver River, collecting in a fountain at the statue’s base where it could be piped out to the other wards.

It was this fountain from which the commotion was carrying; as Anna sped up and Jun followed, he saw at last that one of the City of Heaven cultists had come into the garden and was harassing Kaori.

“Your idolatry has no place in the City of Heaven!” He was jabbing at her with an extended finger; Murata-san kept interposing himself, only for the man in the robe, with his wild hair, to circle around her at another angle. A crowd was gathering.

“I don’t seek the worship of the people,” Kaori mumbled, but she was drowned out by the shouting.

Lotus Mall had been destroyed in the attacks—Rengedai, after all, had gotten some of the worst of it. Tadashi’s was still standing, of course, though barely; and there was a blackened husk that had once held a seller of clocks, which everyone now gave a wide berth as though it were haunted. The rest of the mall, however, was completely gone, dust; Kaori had been inside when it happened, but Murata-san had thrown himself over her, shielding her from danger.

Her livelihood was gone, but the powers bestowed upon her by the rumors only increased in the aftermath. Of all the rumor-based places of healing, only Kaori and Hiiragi had taken to it so fully in service of the people; and while Maki still offered services in the stead of her late employer, Kaori’s gentleness and popularity had only increased her word of mouth. She could now heal the ill and wounded with a mere laying-on of hands, and so attracted followers wherever she went; she’d taken to waiting at the fountain for those who needed her services, which she offered freely—the city went to all lengths to provide her with creature comforts.

“Hear me, people of Xibalba!” The cultist turned to address the crowd, arms outstretched. “Hearken not to false prophets!” There was murmuring all around them, but the preacher’s voice was louder. “We of this city have been chosen! _We alone_ ascend to the heavens aboard this glorious ark! The world’s sins and its depravities are now gone, and it falls to us to ready ourselves for the light and the word that is coming!”

“For him, I’d recommend ylang ylang, jasmine, or lavender,” whispered Kaori at his side. Jun managed a thin smile at that one.

Anna had stalked into the plaza with the intention, no doubt, of laying the man out with a single punch; but when he’d turned from accosting Kaori, she’d halted, unsure if it was still right to strike him. There were cultists all throughout Sumaru; each of them preaching the glory of their ascended state. They made Jun uncomfortable, but to claim the citizens would ascend together into godhood was not a rumor that was taking hold without resistance. Some of the crowd was laughing, and others were shouting back.

It was as if they did not recall the ease with which they’d all believed that the evolution into Idealians was imminent. The human mind had a tendency to deliberately forget what would make it the most pained, or make it confront itself and its darkest desires. But then, these street preachers did not have the television to aid them; the media’s complacency had been his greatest tool, when enacting the will of what he’d thought was his father. People would believe whatever was shown to them, on a television. They’d accepted the return of Nazism almost greedily, normalized it overnight.

It was then, however, that his sermon changed.

“People! It is a truth, that some yet stand in denial of our miracle!” He closed his extended hands into fists. “There are those who cling to their old lives, their old memories! There are those who have retreated into themselves, those who reject our new way of life! You’ve all seen them!” The crowd started, just a bit, to hush. As indeed, who hadn’t, in this city, been party to a person attempting to live in denial, in repression, at the thought of the billions dead, of the earth itself collapsing into fog? “I say to you now that these people, who blaspheme in the face of our City of Heaven, will be delivered! Yes! Each and every man, woman, and child of Xibalba take the truth of our ascension into your hearts, for those who deny our new existence will be visited _by the very angel who triggered it_!”

“What--” Jun managed to get out, and Anna was _moving_ , rushing to intercept the raving preacher, running on the legs of a track star, the legs he’d given back to her, but she’d never be fast enough, not faster than thought, not faster than an idea.

“ _Those who deny, those who claim our existence an impossibility will be delivered by Joker!_ ”

There was a feeling like someone had punched Jun hard in the stomach; there was a visual demonstration before him of Anna punching the preacher the same way, and he folded right over, dropping as Jun dropped, knees to ground. But the word was already spreading, had _been_ spreading for who knows how long, by this man and countless others.

“Joker?”

“--Led the Masked Circle against the Nazis--”

“--Hero of the People--”

“--Returned to us?”

“--Thought he was a demon--”

“--Joker’s going to kill us all!”

Jun clutched at his temples. It couldn’t happen again. Not like this. Not with so few of them left. The world had ended; surely, it couldn’t end _again_.

Kaori’s soothing hands found his shoulders, as she leaned over him. “What is happening?” She asked in an apprehensive whisper.

“I failed,” Jun moaned out slowly, watching as if from outside himself as Anna desperately tried to scatter the crowds, hearing as if from miles away as she let out a bestial roar to the skies above and all around them, a sky lit without the sun.

 

***

 

Tatsuya Suou reached out with his mind for a resonance, and found nothing. Or, less than nothing, an empty space... as if he reached around the world and came back from the other side to find himself again. He could feel the people around him, but not this man right in front of him, radiating hate.

Joker stood before them all, flames and open air framing him like proscenium curtains, sword drawn. The face drawn on his bag the same sneer as on the Other Side, the hair darker but just as wild beneath. It wasn’t Sudou, who was dead; Tatsuya didn’t know _who_ it was.

Takuya held his guns parallel; Maya had always had hers akimbo. Those same pink pistols, the ones that Eikichi had hung onto until their group expanded from three to five. His face was set, serious, the face of someone who knew what it meant to be attacked.

“ _An’ whose fault is it that bitch died, huhh? Whose fault is it the other side got blown to hell!? You killed ‘em all. I almost feel sorry for ‘em.”_

“ _Takuya. If he had lived, he would be about your age... I found him. Sudou had just thrown Takuya’s head into the underbrush and was about to run away.”_

Lisa was groaning, picking herself up. Somewhere off to one side, Uesugi-san was testing the motion of a wounded shoulder. He tightened his fists and stood tall at Takuya’s side.

“You’re both heeeere.” Joker’s voice was a bloody rasp, deep and torn, but the tone was close enough to Sudou’s to pass for an impression. “Both of the _Ta-chans_.” He—for it was at least a “he”—pointed with his sword. “How I’ve waited for this! The two of you took _ever-y-thing_ from me. I’ll delight in killing you both, slooowly.”

“Both of us?” Tatsuya asked.

“Ehhh,” Takuya motioned back with his head towards Brown. “He did it.”

Brown scoffed. “Hey, _what_?”

“Oh, I know _ex-act-ly_ who ‘did it,’ and I’ll haaaave my literal pound of _flesh_.” Joker threw his open hand to one side, and the ugly vacuum-pop and sulfur smell of demons being summoned was unmistakable. “Which of you waaants to go first?”

Four demons. The white stork upon Joker’s shoulder was a Shax, common enough; and the squat, hideous fleshy thing snuffling about his feet with a long red ponytail was Kabandha. The other two were far more dangerous: one to each side of him, humanoid and intelligent enough to be dangerous: the duke of Hell, Barbatos, and atop a massive crocodile, the elegant grand count Zaebos. Both of them high-ranking demons (“Goetia,” whispered Jun’s voice) that would be dangerous enough on their own. In a five-on-five battle at best, they were in immediate trouble.

Lisa pulled on a pair of red, white, and blue fingerless gloves with a scowl. “ _Fanna_. Thought this was all over with.” He didn’t respond, afraid she’d blame his return for theirs.

There was a pause of only a second, which seemed to stretch an eternity. Then the crocodile gnashed its teeth with a sound like roaring.

“Cover your ears!” screamed Takuya, firing his guns, and even as he saw Lisa slap her hands over the sides of her head, Tatsuya was diving over one of the rows of desks. The croc’s sound had masked the cry of the Shax, who trilled from its place on Joker’s shoulder, a high-pitched whine that made his brain feel like it sloshed along the inside of his head. Many of the scurrying staffers had failed to heed the teen’s advice, however, and they dropped to the floor instantly, knocked out cold.

There was a golf bag leaning against the desk, and Tatsuya grimaced, pulling one club free to use in lieu of something useful. He couldn’t imagine how long that bag had been sitting unused—in a world where only one city in the sky remained in all of existence, what land space could be devoted to golf, of all sports? But he’d no sooner drawn the makeshift weapon when Joker was upon him, sword swinging down, and he brought the flimsy shaft up with both hands to block the attack. The Shax was not so obstructed, however, and flew into his face, cold leaking from its beak.

“Weeee don’t _need you_!” shouted Joker, and the filthy paper bag trembled with his breath.

Zaebos had spurred his mount forward towards Brown, who hopped upwards and grabbed onto the exposed sprinkler pipe of the office’s damaged ceiling, pulling his legs up and free just in time to avoid them being torn right off from the force of the crocodile’s jaws. The count pulled on the reins, trying to turn the creature around so he could reach with a sword-swing, but Brown’s pipe snapped free first, and he landed square with it still in his hands, spinning it around to wield as a makeshift spear.

Takuya kicked a desk over even as Barbatos was firing something from his hands that moved like bullets—they impacted with the metal hard, but didn’t penetrate, and he attempted to return fire behind cover. “Lisa! The little one!” She took his direction to heart, using the upended desk as a platform to leap up and over a water blast from the crocodile’s mouth, coming down just shy of landing on the Kabandha, who bit down hard on her ankle.

“ _Kehhei!_ ” She snapped her leg sideways, flinging the demon at Barbatos.

Tatsuya was pinned against the desk; all of Joker’s weight was on top of him, and he couldn’t move without the blade coming down on him. As such, the Shax’s icy breath and claws were tearing him up. He’d never been good with ice, not from the beginning—he shut his eyes, swinging his head about in hopes that the bird would be unable to get to them.

“Do you feeeel _helpless_?” Joker kicked him, hard, right in the genitals, and the whole world constricted. “ _A little taste of what you’ve done to_ me _!_ ” And then there was a blast of wind from behind him, and the stork was pushed back into Joker’s bag-covered head. He yelped, stepped back, and Tatsuya rolled limply aside—getting a glimpse of little Akari Hoshi, Ixquic, her arm outstretched, breathing heavily.

“It’s whoop-ass time,” Ixquic breathed.

“ _Hell yeah_ it is!” Takuya stood, firing both pistols at Joker.

The bullets hit a wall of flame that erupted from the floor, flame so hot they melted before they reached him. There was an idle, detached part of Tatsuya that wondered how the bag didn’t catch fire.

“Get these people _out_ of here!” he groaned instead. The floor was littered with writers, and Mizuno was slumped just by the elevator.

“Little busy!” Brown was holding the crocodile back with his length of pipe, but only just.

Tatsuya tossed aside the bent and mangled golf club—a terrible choice of weapon anyway—and willed a jet of his own flame towards Zaebos, only for it to hit a wall of nothing in the air and curl back towards him. He cursed inwardly, as the yapping Kabandha skittered by, protected by its incantation of Makarakarn. Lisa dove past after it, grabbing it and slamming it against the wall with the force of her pounce. He turned back towards Joker, only for a blast of pure almighty force from Barbatos to lift him up and send him sailing backwards.

Joker had set his sights on Takuya in the interim, lunging forward with his sword itself on fire. Takuya dodged to one side, firing bullets that did nothing; when Joker spun to regain his footing and bring his sword down on him, however, Takuya called out a name.

“ _Ares!_ ”

The air shimmered for a moment as Tatsuya, his ears ringing, saw the persona block with an ephemeral sword. It was green and white, and it looked made of car parts welded together at wrong angles; in the way of personas, even the briefest glimpse conveyed the impression—of a samurai’s armor, of a transforming tank robot, of military fatigues, of literally being made of shields, a Spartan helmet topped with an exhaust pipe,a visual resolved from ideas rather than a literal, translatable image.

Lisa, to one side, pitched the Kabandha with one hand, landing a perfect three-point throw into the crocodile’s mouth. It crunched down sloppily, spraying demon gore in all directions. Tatsuya picked himself up, and Lisa clapped a hand on his shoulder—he could feel that healing warmth for the second time in a day.

Takuya kicked up with both feet, launching Joker backwards, and Tatsuya got a glimpse of Hoshi slamming Barbatos over the head with a typewriter, only to get blasted back against the wall. Lisa broke off to assist Brown; the older man was holding his own, but Zaebos was stomping around where the largest number of their victims lay prone and sleeping, and so he had to keep provoking and luring the demon away from where he’d step on—or even eat—one of the innocent bystanders.

Tatsuya had never fought alongside Brown, not on either side. They’d talked a bit, but the television star had just shrugged at the mention of combat. “Wasn’t that great at it,” he’d said, “I can blow stuff up all right, but I never had, whadayacall, _finesse_.” He was limited by the arena, the people he could hurt if he cut loose with his persona. The demons, for their part, didn’t have the same limitations—the crocodile went for a junior writer, and Lisa delivered an uppercut that snapped its jaws back towards Brown, who lunged forward, trying to stab at the croc’s rider, only to pull back as it snapped at him again.

Hoshi did something with her hands that exploded at Joker; the Shax landed back on his shoulder and there was a soft light, one that no doubt provided similar healing relief as the magic that Lisa had just used on him.

So he rushed Joker himself. He tackled him around the waist, throwing him to the ground, even as he heard one of Takuya’s pistols fire at the circling Shax. They rolled, Joker getting a knee hard into his own, but Tatsuya had the force of momentum, and he wound up on top, pinning his sword arm back with one hand.

The Shax came in for a swoop, but Takuya fired, and it swung low and around to avoid the shots. And then Barbatos stomped the ground, sending a wave of force and torn floor up like a shockwave, and Takuya was forced to pull back, nearly tripping over an upended office chair.

He looked at the smile painted in blood on the kraft paper bag. A few spots of blood from his opened wrist dropped freckles upon it from his upraised fist, and he heard the bone rattle of Joker’s chuckling echo inside the paper. “What do you want?” He roared, landing a punch on meat through the crumpled bag. “Who _are_ you?”

There was a... pause... a silent hum, as if the world had stopped for a second, and then Joker was not beneath him, but _behind_ him, his blade to Tatsuya’s neck, how, so fast, and there was an intense heat, a nuclear heat, and then—white.

 

***

 

Chika Ueda was running late. Her detour to Hirasaka had put her too far to the opposite end of the city; she’d watched Eikichi and Miyabi unhitch their bicycles and ride south, all but dancing from one foot to the other. Many people in Sumaru had switched to bicycles since they’d taken to the sky; fuel was at a premium, and many roads were partially blocked. There was a shop in Yumezaki that had changed from sales to rentals, trading in food at reasonable rates, though just as often people would just discard their bikes for the use of another upon reaching their destination.

Chikarin, however, had no bike on-hand, and an appointment in Aoba that couldn’t be missed. She’d just... _had_ to tell them about Tatsuya-senpai, didn’t dare wait on it.

He wasn’t all right, right? Not if he just turned down wanting to see Jun, _everyone_ knew the story with those two, and she of all people would know what everyone else would know. But they’d fix it; Miyabi was the smartest, kindest, bravest person she’d ever met, and Eikichi had helped save everyone, so he was practically as good. She didn’t have to worry. Nope, no worrying. None. At all.

She was pretty panicked, actually. But now was the time for action, which was to say finding a bicycle so that she could meet Lisa before the...

“Oh, hello.” Toro-san appeared at her side, jacket over his shoulder, wiping his hands with a cloth towel. “Ueda-san, right? Long time.”

“Oh!” She saluted. “Hey there, sir!” Toro was one of the best rumormongers in the city, which was to say that he approached her level. They’d not often met to exchange notes, but you couldn’t live in this city forever without crossing paths. And with Toku-sensei having passed on, there were only so many of them left.

“You write for the Free Press, right?” He rolled down one sleeve, fussing awkwardly with a button. “Do you need a ride to the assembly?”

“Are you for serious?” She clapped her hands together.

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Just wait here with me for... I’d say five minutes, tops.”

Waiting even longer seemed like the worst way to get there on time, but even as a small amount of space to hold the last of humanity, Sumaru was still a very large city to cover on foot. And the subway lines were not an option, not anymore.

So she clapped her hands behind her back, rocked on her heels, and tried not to think about the slope of Tatsuya Suou’s shoulders as he said he was tired and heading back to the bed where he’d lain for months.

“Are you all right?” Toro had replaced both cuffs and pulled on his jacket, and now chewed absently upon a toothpick.

“...Why do you ask?” Years of reporting and collecting gossip had left Chikarin with a healthy suspicion of public interest, especially from a fellow ‘monger. He smelled a story, and she wasn’t going to share it.

Toro, for his part, merely chuckled, placed his hands in his pockets. “Fair enough.”

At about four minutes and some number of seconds, a black town car wound its way into the lot, the only vehicle she’d seen move in the last hour and a half. The window rolled down, and a hard-chinned man appeared, giving them both only a glance before rolling it back up and unlocking the doors.

“Matsuoka didn’t open the door for me.” Toro was grinning. “That means Kei-kun is absolutely furious that I’m late.”

“You know the mayor?” She goggled.

He glanced over, and with a sly smile, climbed into the car’s back seat. “...Why do you ask?”

She huffed, following.

It was strange to think, in just a few months, how quickly riding in an automobile had come to feel like an incredible luxury. She ran her hands over the perfect, mar-free leather upholstery and hoped that she didn’t shed any feathers. And despite the rubble, the potholes and cracks, the ride was smooth as silk. They’d pulled back out of the lot and onto the road out of Hirasaka ward before she’d even realized they were in motion.

“Not to worry,” Toro said with a wink, “they can’t start without us.”

There was a hoarse, wet cough in response, and Chikarin looked up to see that a man was sitting in the front passenger’s seat; though whether he’d done so in anticipation of Toro’s larger size, or seeking the comfort of the front seat when he was clearly unwell, she couldn’t begin to guess.

“General,” Toro said, with an abbreviated bow owing to the cramped vehicle. And as she looked, she could see that the sick man was indeed wearing military dress. He had a damp handkerchief over his mouth, and his glasses were fogged up.

“Yokouchi-san,” the general mumbled around what sounded like an apple’s-width ball of phlegm in his throat.

“This is Miss Ueda.” Toro gestured to her. “We used to work in the same field; she is also covering the event today in the Free Press.”

The general nodded to her, but he had another rib-rattling cough and had to turn away.

“Please don’t take it for rudeness,” Toro said unnecessarily. “Before Xibalba rose, the general contracted a nasty illness while overseas.” He rolled his own window down. “The Senkaku islands, right General?”

The general gave him a dirty look. “Yokouchi-san, I was sailing with family from Okinawa; you make it sound as if I was stationed there.”

“Forgive me.” And Toro made another half-bow, turning to her with a smile. “Our guest here was likely not taught why the distinction would matter in school, in any case.”

“Nor would it matter now, with the islands gone.” The General looked back again, and his appraisal of both of them seemed a lot colder, more suspicious. “A lot of distinctions no longer matter in the slightest.”

Chikarin didn’t speak. It was true, actually, that they hadn’t covered the material, back when she’d attended Seven Sisters—her history teacher had been Okamura-sensei, Lisa’s homeroom teacher, and she’d fairly often gone... _off-book_ , in her lesson plans. But she’d written an article for the school paper on the subject.

There had been, over the last few years before the end of the world, a greater number of foreigners intermingling with native Japanese in their cosmopolitan city, and there had been a certain amount of... _racial tension_ amongst the student body, especially when it came to native-born Chinese and Taiwanese students (and frequently an inability to distinguish them, in her classmates). And rumors had abounded that some of the tags left around Yumezaki were not from local gangs, but were in fact Taiwanese mafia symbols. Not a rumor she’d ever substantiated, but she’d spent a few inches of column-space to the subject of the hotly-contested islands, a source of tension between the SDF and the Chinese military for ages. If a bunch of SDF soldiers had been stationed there _in secret_ , back when the islands existed, it would mean the Ministry of Defense risking a war.

As a reporter, Chikarin was interested; as a teenage girl, Chikarin wondered why it mattered when all the nations of the world were dead and gone. But as a rumormonger, she knew above all that every detail mattered to _somebody_. This was one to file away for later, when she could figure out how it was useful.

The car pulled past the monument to the fallen firefighters who had died in the terrorist attacks which preceded the launch of Xibalba, and reached Aoba’s major intersection. Chikarin was watching the crowds outside her window as they milled about the Sumaru TV building; as Toro asked Matsuoka where they were to meet with the mayor and the rest of his interim government, however, she saw something that prompted her to open the door with the car in motion.

“Whoa! Hey, be caref--” But Toro’s words were lost as she hopped from the slow-moving vehicle, stumbling but managing not to topple as her eyes were not in front of her, but up—at the Kismet Publishing building, where one of its upper floors was smoking. People were pointing and crying out at the sight, and she heard the murmur of rumors, her currency, but she just stepped through them, mouth open.

“Lisa-senpai!” She reached up, as if she could touch the building from half a block and several stories away, and winced back as a bright white flare erupted.

“Do you think they’re bombing buildings again?” asked a passer-by, and she clenched her fists.

The first time around, when Lisa and Tatsuya, when Eikichi and Jun and Takuya, even Miyabi in her own way, were running about, searching for answers, battling the demons that had come to Sumaru City, Chikarin instead had held court at a table in the Peace Diner; she’d sipped on a vanilla milkshake the size of her head, and people had come to her with the word of the street as often as she’d find it outside. She’d been able to fool herself into believing that she was helping, in her own way—it was certainly what Lisa had said to her then, what Hanakouji-senpai would proceed to tell her over and over again in the months since the world burned down. But she’d often not been so sure.

They’d come back to the fast food joint from one of those temples, the one across the street—Scorpio, the one where GOLD gym had once been. It was when Eikichi had finally brought Miyabi back; she’d hugged her and cried her damned eyes out—both of them had cried, in fact, and Eikichi had turned around to not watch, messing with his sleeve. But it was only then, when Chikarin had noticed the toll it had been taking on them. Miyabi’s shaking, furtive guilt; the handkerchief that Jun had tied around Tatsuya’s bleeding shoulder; the twitchy, fidgeting looks that Lisa would give anyone that passed by; the way that Takuya slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor, falling asleep without prompting.

She hadn’t helped at all, is what she truly believed. And so as people screamed, she ran forward, towards the building...

...Only to be grabbed from behind by the driver, Matsuoka, who had arms like tree trunks.

“Forgive me, Ueda-san.” He held her fast with a single arm, even as she kicked and struggled to break free. His other hand was at his ear. “We are addressing the problem; do not be alarmed.”

“Let me go, ya lummox! Freedom for the press!” She thrashed, getting nowhere.

Toro appeared in her field of vision, his expression as stern as she’d ever seen. “Chikarin. If people are hurt up there, you’re one of the last reporters left, right? We need you.”

Her legs slowly stopped kicking, dangling helplessly. She didn’t take her eyes off the flashes of light up above. “But...”

“Believe in your friends.” Toro tossed his toothpick aside. “Not everyone helps in the same way.”

 

***

 

When Tatsuya’s vision cleared, or at least the pure white broke apart into spots small enough that he could see around them, he could tell that the situation had grown progressively worse.

Generally speaking, they’d had less experience fighting around civilians than the veterans of Mikage-Cho. The demons of the last year had prowled empty corridors, burnt-out factories, and abandoned bomb shelters far more than they’d prowled the streets until the end, and by that point it had been Yukino, Anna, Maki, and the others who had taken to the streets as they’d followed His path underground. But they were also hardened professionals—had to be, after battling trained armies of Nazi constructs and the organized cultists of the Masked Circle time and again. Lisa and Takuya had been just as quick as Brown to throw themselves upon the knocked-out staffers of the Sumaru Free Press when Joker’s blast had gone off, and thus they—and their personas—had taken the brunt of the attack full-on.

Takuya’s head was awkwardly jammed in Mizuno’s lap. “Gross,” came a muffled moan from his direction. At his side was the bullet-riddled corpse of the Shax, lying on a patch of frost.

Too, Brown had managed a victory against Zaebos; as it had charged him, prone over the body of the writer he’d been yelling at bare minutes earlier, he’d rolled over and raised his length of pipe—it had gone right up through the soft flesh inside the crocodile’s mouth and erupted through the back of his head, leaving the count off-balance without his mount.

But the flash had decimated what was left of the office—the furniture that they’d used for cover was smoking ash that circled in clouds with the wind from outside. And in the center of that cloud, the Barbatos at his side, was Joker, unharmed or close enough to it, holding Hoshi off of the ground by the throat.

“Such _ecs-ta-cy_ , the pain on your faaaace,” hissed the tattered paper bag. “A fraction of what I’ve felt! You will lose what I’ve lost!” And he outstretched his arm, dangling the limp girl over the edge—and the multi-story drop.

Tatsuya tried to speak, to say no, but he realized that Joker’s blade had indeed cut his throat. Wide-eyed, he clamped his hand over the oozing wound. Purposeful or no, the blade hadn’t so much as nicked his carotid, but the blood was still everywhere, with no signs of stopping. He gagged.

“You have _no idea_ how it feeeels, Tatsuya Suou...” Joker held up his other hand, with the sword, pointing, and at times he looked so much like Sudou he could believe it was him, back to life, by rumors or whatever else. “To have _ever-y-thing_ striiiiiipped from you.”

_\--Maya gagged up blood, and her vision was already foggy; she couldn’t focus on Lisa’s hands as she desperately, tearfully, tried to pour the strength of her persona’s power into the holy lance’s wound--_

_\--He stared at the outstretched lighter in Jun’s hands, the rush of wind coming in through the open doors of the blimp cutting at his eyes, his fingers twitching for what he could not take in his hands--_

Holding his throat tightly with one hand, the hand ending in his awkward bandaging from the night before, now soaked through again, he uneasily stood.

“Come closer.” Joker beckoned with the sword. “Beg for her life.”

“ _It’s been ages, Tatsuya Suou... I’ve been waiting... for the moment you would all summon me!” Jun, his face not painted or masked, but changed... somehow, his heart, his persona, had known before he did. “...And you, the Thief... it’s time you died! You cannot escape the wheel of fortune!” The raging force of His attack through Jun’s hands, the hand around his throat, like Hoshi’s now... “Those eyes... you haven’t changed. What kind of dreams did you build on the corpses of other people’s ideals?” An iris flower, like he wouldn’t see again until one was tucked into Jun’s pocket in the depths of Caracol. He’d wanted to crush it in his fist, and had instead tucked it away into his jacket pocket, where it sat next to the lighter that kept his anxieties and loss at bay._

He slowly walked forward, his groaning muscles fighting him. He could hear Lisa stirring behind him, could see Zaebos holding his sword to Brown’s battered face. He got close enough to hear the sounds of buzzing and flapping leather wings that came from within Barbatos, and prepared to drop to one knee.

And then the fire door swung open, and Yukino Mayuzumi was there at the head of a half-dozen black-clad Nanjo Group enforcers.

“Oh thank God, an adult,” Brown gasped through split lips.

The first razor was loosed from her hand before Joker could react; but by the time that Barbatos was lurching backwards, the blade between its beady red eyes, his grip was releasing on Hoshi.

“ _What?_ ” Joker managed to get out as the heavily-armed men erupted from the stairwell, spreading out to secure the unconscious writers, but Tatsuya was already darting past him, uncaring.

The slam of the door, or the shock of the drop, had woken Hoshi, and she screamed as she fell. Tatsuya lunged forward, willing himself to move, even as the sight of her started to vanish from the angle of the floor, as she fell past their story of the building, as he reached out his good arm...

_The rope snapped even as the plane itself started to fall, and Maya couldn’t even voice the shriek of fear that her face expressed, he lurched over the rail, willing his arm longer as she slipped out of reach, the flames rising to meet her..._

He grabbed Hoshi’s hand in midair, only realizing afterwards that he’d gone all the way off the edge of the building, as he felt his feet leave the floor...

And he felt something grab his legs, felt his head turn even as he gripped Hoshi with all his strength, and found Takuya there, hanging onto him, with a pair of Nanjo men keeping him from toppling over with them.

“I’ve got you! Hang on!”

He tilted, willing his grip to hold, and saw Lisa in combat with Joker, Yukino at her back.

Joker was fast, and he was blocking as many attacks as he was taking, but Lisa was enraged and had Yukino throwing blades to disrupt his dodging patterns, and so he was stumbling to keep up. His flaming sword would send her stepping back, only for her to dodge beneath and lay a strong bunch to his side that would stagger him; he’d erupt a blast in her face, but find a razor stuck in his hand as a reward. He moved in a way that was familiar, but Tatsuya at least could not quite place it...

What was stranger still, was that for all of Joker’s apparent rage, for all of his indiscriminate violence, his lack of care for the civilians and his willingness to throw a twelve-year old girl from a building, he was... pulling his punches? His sword-swipes were more defensive than anything, he’d surely had the chance to drive his blade through Lisa even harried by their simultaneous attack. He was losing ground.

Two of Nanjo’s men riddled Zaebos with bullets, and he dropped like a stone; Brown stood shakily, pulling his length of pipe free from the dead crocodile, and spun it lazily, kicking the dead Barbatos for good measure.

In truth, Lisa didn’t have her optimum range of movement in the ridiculous idolwear; it was slowing her kicks down. But Venus threw up shields to bounce Joker’s flame harmlessly away, and her punches carried the full magical weight of earth and water. The water-propelled punches, in particular, seemed to stagger him when they managed to connect. Each time he reeled, though, he’d sidestep, and Nanjo’s men couldn’t get a clear shot without risking Lisa.

It was then that he saw—he was pivoting bit by bit around, so that he could move for Yukino. He wanted to shout, but his voice wouldn’t work, the open seam of his throat shuddering at the touch of wind, his body contorted as they bent him to reach Hoshi, who was whimpering, afraid to let go.

And then Brown was behind Joker, restraining his arms with his makeshift spear across his chest. Joker’s body began to radiate flame, but Brown held on, screaming.

“Uesugi-san...” Lisa gasped.

“Brown, don’t!” Yukino shouted, but the man’s persona, blue and caped, appeared for just an instant as some energy of his own surged all around him--

\--And then the world inhaled again, as Joker appeared behind Brown, energy flaring between his palms--

\--And then Lisa punched the floor, and a burst of water and white hot light shot up through Joker, blasting Brown roughly aside, consuming Joker in the torrent. He screamed, scraped on all sides by a force like erosion in fast-forward.

His coat ballooned open, and beneath was a red motorcycle jacket, stained dark with blood.

 

***

 

“I said, _slow down_.” The man in the police officer’s uniform gripped the phone tightly, but his voice was tighter. “Start over, and form complete sentences.”

“Uh, right, sorry, uh...” The voice on the other end was nervous, and deeper than its natural register—a teenage boy playing at being a man. “I’m a friend of your son... your younger son. Uh. We... found? Where he’d been hiding out, and it seems like he’d... gotten hurt?” The boy was a poor liar, but at least some of it had the ring of truth. He knew what malicious lying sounded like, all too well. “We’re... we want to go look for him, but he might also come _back_ , and we thought...”

“Where are you, right now?” He listened. “No, an address.” He listened. “All right. I am on my way there. Stay _put_.” They wouldn’t. “I’m going to want to ask some questions.”

“Yeah, yeah sure.” The boy’s voice seemed distracted. “Just... please don’t be too hard on him, okay? He’s... good. He’s really good.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He hung up the phone, took a long, shaking breath.

“Who was that?” His wife stood in the doorway. He grabbed his officer’s cap and pulled it on.

“They claimed Tatsuya’s hurt, somewhere.” He holstered his sidearm. “It might be a prank...” But he couldn’t well not investigate. “They said they’d found where he’d been hiding out.”

Tatsuya’s mother frowned. “Hiding? But we saw him only yesterday.”

 

***

 

Strong arms lifted him back into the office, and he exchanged looks with Hoshi, who was shivering, clutching her arms. It was doubly-familiar for her, he had no doubt. One of Nanjo’s men was pressing a healing bead into his hand, and he gripped it tightly as he held his throat, feeling it dissolve in his palm, the skin beginning to warm.

He turned, then, and saw Joker, his open jacket, his all-too-familiar outfit beneath. “What?”

Joker looked down at himself, and started laughing; a scratchy, raw sound. “Lisa Ssssilverman... we hurt those we love the most, don’t we?” He staggered. “Walk away, and leave them to their fate.”

“ _Holeen_ , now that you’ve lost, you think we’ll let you escape?” She pointed a finger. “Who are you, really?”

And he grabbed the torn, sodden bag and pulled it apart.

“ _Aiyah! Ngh Hoh Yi!_ ”

Tatsuya, from his seated position on the floor, looked up and saw... himself. His own face, wreathed in a mane of longer hair, one side of his face burnt and scarred—Sudou’s burns. His jaw struggled to move.

“ _The real you never makes any decisions, not even for your own benefit.” His shadow grinned, descending the stairs casually, fearlessly, more comfortable in its own false skin than he’d ever felt in his own. “A man like you could never save even one person, let alone the world. Why, I bet that deep down inside, you actually hate Jun...” The hilt of his sword was slick with sweat. He could feel, rather than see, Jun tense up behind him. He struggled to speak, even as he felt everyone’s eyes turn to him._

“My name,” said Joker, as an image of Reverse Apollo flickered behind him, “is Chinyan.”

Lisa stumbled backwards into Yukino, who lowered her held razor in shock.

“You took my liiiiife, Tatsuya Suou...” He was breathing heavily. “And you, Takuya Miyashiro, yoooou took that which gave my life _meaning and purpose_... my love, Lisa Silverman...”

Lisa was shaking her head, too stunned to speak.

“I _will_ have my revenge.” This other Tatsuya, this other him, sheathed his sword. “And if it can’t happen heeeeere...” He turned, and their gaze followed his... to the Sumaru TV station, where thousands were clustered, milling, trying to get entry to the assembly.

“No,” Tatsuya whispered.

“...I’ll make you _beg_ for death.”

“Fire!” Yukino shouted, but a wall of flame rose again to melt the bullets into useless slag and nothing.

“Will the guilt destrooooy you?” Joker—Tatsuya—jumped, grabbing the exterior wall and flipping upwards out of sight. “Or do you _deliiight_ in it? We both know the answer!”

Yukino ran to the building’s edge, looking up, but her posture told all—he was gone.

 

***

 

“Understood; we’ll await your arrival.” Kei Nanjo clicked the handheld radio and turned to his companions. “The matter is resolved.”

“Like Hell it is.” Steven Silverman crossed his arms. “This _matter_ will not be resolved until my daughter is brought here safely. Explain to me, Nanjo-san, what exactly happened, and how was it allowed to happen?”

“Demon attacks are, regrettably, now an unavoidable facet of all of our lives, Mr. Silverman.” Nanjo turned, let the makeup artist apply powder as he watched in a handheld mirror. “What matters most is that the situation was deescalated without human fatalities, or indeed, many serious injuries at all.” This was at least in the vicinity of the truth. Yukino’s terse report suggested a great many questions that would need answering, as well as a full acknowledgment that the two-way was not a secure channel. “Your daughter, Mizuno-san, and the others are being relayed here shortly. EMTs have arrived to administer to the other Free Press staff who were caught in what I’m told is an ultimately harmless attack to their equilibrium. What we should be most concerned with is the assembly, which is imminent.”

Silverman attempted to wave off a stylist who was examining his ponytail in abject disgust. “Demon attacks have been infrequent for months. I’m not certain your explanation of ‘happenstance’ holds much credence with me.”

“Respectfully, I for my own part am not certain your credentials extend to a greater knowledge of demon behavior than that of my trained professionals.” He gave the father a wry look. “You are concerned for your daughter’s safety, which is only natural. But your aggression’s rise only after the matter has been brought to a safe close is an _American_ trait which I fear might alarm some in the audience today, when we gather in order to earn their trust.”

Steven blanched, and then his lips thinned, just as the woman boffed him with powder.

They were in a small room just behind soundstage three in the Sumaru TV building. Soon enough, the stage—which had once hosted Hidehiko’s truly insipid television show—would be standing-room only, crowded full of Sumaru citizens hoping to engage in dialogue with the city’s new interim government. Elly had gone out to meet Matsuoka, who was wrangling Toro and the General, and Ms. Saeko was in the next room over with some of the other members, but there was little chance of privacy this close to the event, and so Nanjo had been forced to issue directives in front of, among others, his more recent appointee. It had been a comedy of errors.

“While Mr. Silverman’s focus is understandable,” said another voice in the room, “for my part I’m more concerned with the matter of your private army, Nanjo-san.”

He rotated his make-up chair to see Chief Togashi, already finished and looking smart in full-dress and light make-up. His shoes were shined to almost new, and he had his cap under his arm at attention, as if posing for a recruitment poster; but his eyes were focused down at Kei, and his expression was unreadable.

He scoffed. “Twelve agents total is hardly an army, Togashi-san.”

Togashi’s empty hand twitched, his thumb rubbing against his fingertips—wanting a cigarette, unable to smoke with the make-up. Cigarettes were harder to find in the new world, the rare currency that still held weight—like for prisoners. Before the incident at Kismet broke, Silverman had been dryly joking that they institute a prison economy.

“Nanjo-san... _Mr. Mayor_...” The latter in heavily-accented English, “My concern is that you are in possession of an extra-judicial armed force _at all_ , no matter how legal and licensed their firearms.”

“The Nanjo Group maintained a loyal private security long before the world changed, Chief Togashi.” He sniffed. “Such things are hardly uncommon. I am fortunate that these twelve men and women were in Sumaru City in my retinue as I was inspecting local holdings, as indeed are they, that they are still with us.”

The Nanjo Group’s private security firm had actually been quite robust in the past; a collection of police officers bribed with better offers, ex-Yakuza who transitioned without a beat, and particularly PMCs who had been absorbed in corporate buyouts by his father, who had expanded his defensive presence rapidly right about the time he began secretly buying up pieces of the broken-up SEBEC via shell corporations. The thirteen remaining agents were specifically those that had proven either ethically-strict or loyal to Kei, hand-picked by Matsuoka and listed in the same report that had contained Kei’s first knowledge of the buyouts.

Matsuoka had endangered his career, his standing, and his life by engaging in industrial espionage into his own master’s business, and largely to prove himself to a young man unwilling to open his heart to a second butler, after the first had... well.

His “private army”—and Matsuoka himself—had accompanied him to Sumaru City upon reports that someone matching the late Takahisa Kandori’s description had been seen in conjunction with what were clearly demon appearances. It had been unlikely, but he couldn’t ignore it—and indeed, it _was_ impossible, farcical and obvious, the embarrassment soothed only by the chance to reconnect with old friends. But events _had_ been in motion, and the ensuing chaos had been the opportunity that he and Matsuoka had been looking for; they’d set up in a penthouse in Narumi and began digging into another matter which related heavily to the events of the past, and to the sins of his father. He’d let Eriko and Maki into the loop and nobody else, knowing he’d be watched.

But then the end of the world came. He’d joined his friends on the front line, and his cadre had done what they could as well, securing people’s safety, subduing demons, Nazi thoughtforms, and the brainwashed populace in “Masked Circle” robes where they could. The collapse of Narumi had claimed a good man’s life, but the other twelve had survived, if not without injury.

“If the goal is to allay the people’s fears,” tested Togashi carefully, “not displaying trust and faith in the city’s police force may send the wrong impression.”

Nanjo smirked.

“Your police were no quicker to the scene,” Steven said calmly, adjusting his haori and smoothing it out.

“ _Our_ police are spread thin, to say nothing of those managing the crowds at this very building today.” Togashi frowned. “In order to service the people, I’ve had to reinstate officers with non-violent offenses and call older police out of retirement. Recruitment remains low because the people do not view the police as an adequate response to the demon threat.”

“The terrorist actions that went unaddressed just prior to the Grand Cross may be a factor,” Nanjo said dryly, and checked his own suit. This is one reason for today’s assembly: to restore confidence.”

“Perhaps, then, a compromise.” Togashi turned to inspect his own appearance, even though Nanjo knew he had no need. Togashi wasn’t actually very good at this chess game; he was ham-fisted and slow to move. But he’d been forced into it. At one point, he might’ve been a good police officer, but he’d been used for other things for so long, things for which he had no aptitude, that he came across as hollow.

He had a sudden memory of years ago, people with featureless, cracked masks, and the yawning abyss within, and fought to dismiss it.

“Rather than your usual security complement,” Togashi was continuing, “Appear today with a police escort. The visual display will be more convincing than speeches.”

Togashi wasn’t stupid enough to think Kei was _this_ stupid—this was a direction from above him. But the one who’d ordered Togashi was even less of a fool, and thus the question was what he’d have to gain. Was it just the suggestion that somebody could be placed so close? But that didn’t track; in allowing it, Kei sent the stronger message.

Endure a blow, and administer two—that was the secret of battle. “Agreed. But I’d propose that similarly, appearing with a high-ranking detail sends the wrong message, that I’m utilizing the police’s services as my own. Better someone with their feet on the ground, noticeable but not conspicuous.”

Togashi nodded absently, as though he didn’t especially care. “Fair enough. I believe I have someone out at the front gates that’s suitable; I’ll call them up.”

“Good. In that spirit...” Nanjo twitched as an aide attached a microphone to his lapel, and saw Steven struggling similarly. “I wonder if there isn’t a favor you could attempt for me when time allows.”

Togashi had the good grace to raise his eyebrow.

Kei adjusted his cuffs. “As I needn’t remind anyone, the _In’Lakech_ , the book which received a great deal of local press just prior to Xibalba’s launch, predicted many of the events which occurred in Sumaru to an uncanny degree. It’s my understanding that the author of that text died under mysterious circumstances.”

“You want to reopen the Kashihara case?” Togashi gave him a dark look, but he didn’t seem especially surprised. Good. This meant that Kei had anticipated his true opponent rightly. “I remember those days; my old partner and I investigated the scene ourselves. We deemed it an accident; I wouldn’t object to turning over our investigation report, given latter-day circumstances, but the destruction of the police station means all of our old records are gone.”

“I remember that day, myself.” Silverman crossed his arms. “You questioned _me_ back then—I had called the police on behalf of my daughter, and you believed the fire at Alaya Shrine related to the case.”

“Somebody did, at any rate,” Togashi muttered. “We did investigate all available leads, even those which proved fruitless. This is why I doubt the results will change.”

Steven frowned and shook his head. “Not my point, actually. At the time, I was concerned with Lisa’s welfare. I did not consider: why were the Kounan police called in to investigate an accident in Rengedai?”

Togashi blinked. Nanjo turned away to avoid appearing pleased. They both knew the answer to that question, and also why he couldn’t answer it. While he couldn’t have predicted the attack across the street, and the tension that would put between he and Silverman, in all other respects bringing him into the interim government was paying off exactly as intended.

“The first... hm.” Togashi pursed his lips. “Ah, yes. I recall now. The officers in that ward were stretched thin, called in to guard visiting politicians from Tokyo.”

“You don’t say,” drawled Kei.

But thinking about the attack sobered him; Yukino couldn’t speak openly over the radio, but there was no doubt that she seemed still apprehensive. The threat was not actually eliminated, whatever it might be. If that were the case, however, one might suppose logically that the assembly would be the most likely and most high-profile target: a human aggressor might be swayed by the increased police and security presence, but not a devil summoner.

Nanjo had no idea who had attacked Kismet, nor why, so he was unable to predict their behavior. It would not be an unreasonable move to cancel the assembly entirely, to dare not risk the people’s safety. The problem, however was most notably this: to do so would cause rumors.

Kei Nanjo had never been the most adept at reading another’s heart, to put it mildly; he was a better man, a more world-wise man, than he was four years ago, his time spent undercover within his own businesses, the careful work of his closest friends, and a better outlook in general, all of these left him a more complete person than he’d once been, but hardly a socially-comfortable one. But since the day he’d met that high-school boy in the office of an abandoned factory, he’d been forced to predict the thoughts and feelings of the common populace not only daily, but nearly by the hour, just to ensure their safety. Their hail mary play the night after the city lifted, spreading the rumor about power and water, had only barely worked, and not without consequence; but it had forced him into check. He had to be as transparent as possible in his dealings in order to not incite gossip, while still secretly working toward his actual goals.

Insofar as that meant relying upon people like Toro to do some of his work for him, that was fine; when it came to weighing the risk of an attack versus the danger of city-wide panic, it was a no-win scenario.

He had multiple persona-users and a number of trained combat professionals stationed throughout the building—would it be enough?

His radio crackled to life. “Mr. Mayor?” Elly purred, “The packages are secure.”

Packages, plural?

 

***

 

Takuya Miyashiro took a long, shaking breath; it had been months since real violence, and the adrenaline was sometimes tough to slough off. He could see, to one side, Tatsuya’s own adrenaline high burning out—he was clutching onto his torn throat, the pain finally registering with the battle over. He was healing, but healing could only be so fast.

Lisa grabbed him, thrust her face into his chest. He held her; wasn’t sure what else he could do.

“What is happening?” she sobbed, and he cradled her head, stared at Tatsuya. He didn’t know how to answer her.

Tatsuya turned away, tried to hiss something out to Hoshi, who was clutching her knees. She grabbed onto him, and he winced, fumbled with his hands, as if he didn’t know how to hug.

Takuya rubbed Lisa’s back as she cried. She’d never been a woman to cry often; in fact, he’d likely seen nearly every time she’d cried in all her life. He kept staring over her shoulder at Tatsuya, trying hard not to blame him. Trying very, very hard.

“ _My name is Chinyan.”_

Takuya’s heart ached.

A few months ago, Lisa Silverman had hated Takuya Miyashiro; he’d been class rep in their second-year homeroom, silencing their raucous classmates when Ms. Ideal would enter. He was the class’s top student, most of Sevens thought he was a kiss-ass, and Lisa in particular (as the de facto Miss Sevens) had absolutely no use for him. Some of that, he’d later come to know, was because of Lisa’s insecurities, of the way the other students had singled her out, she’d sought out someone she could stand above, someone who wouldn’t fight back.

And some of it was because he’d hated Tatsuya Suou.

Suou was cock of the walk at Seven Sisters High, and he’d never done anything to earn it, save riding in on that damned motorcycle on the first day of his third year; people talked about him as if he’d hung the very sun in the sky. Handsome, they’d said; effortlessly cool, they’d said; good with his hands, a mysterious past, it was like he’d strolled in off the cover of a shoujo manga, and he hadn’t the patience for anyone around him. He barely talked to people, just slouched in his back row seat never getting called upon by any of the teachers. Even Ms. Saeko had been taken with him instantly, and she’d seemed so smart and perceptive otherwise.

So yeah, Takuya had singled him out, brought the infinitesimally small power at his disposal to bear on Tatsuya whenever possible, giving him extra cleaning duties, calling out when he fell asleep, or lingered in the halls. He always seemed ready to bolt, and while he’d never cut a class, Takuya had just kept waiting for the day when it finally happened, so he could finally shine a light on him, that he’d always been a delinquent at heart. He’d always seemed to sleepwalk through life, hadn’t a dream or an ideal to his name, and he didn’t even have the good grace to get sick when the strange disease started to spread among the students.

Then, one day, a pair of journalists had come to Sevens to interview him, Tatsuya. _Coolest_ magazine. It had made his blood boil.

“What... what happened?” Mizuno was shaking her head as one of the Nanjo security force finally roused her.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brown muttered from where he’d slumped into an office chair that he’d dragged upright; he was clutching his head and was sodden, from Lisa’s attack and his own sweat in equal measure.

Yukino clicked off her handheld radio and stalked back over to where Tatsuya was awkwardly holding a shivering thirteen year-old girl. “Just like old times, huh? Tatsuya-kun, what the _Hell_?”

He hung his head, not saying anything. Whether it was because of his healing throat or the typical Suou opaqueness was one to ponder, Takuya supposed. In lieu of that, he gripped Lisa harder and looked up at the fuming Yukino.

“Not that I’m not grateful, Big Yuki, but are you working for the Mayor now or something? What is all this?”

She shook her head. “I agreed to help out an old friend today as a favor, that’s all.” Since the end of the world, Yukino had hardly sat still. She’d taken photos, helped reconstruction efforts, spent time resettling Anna and Noriko, and ferried Maki all around town for her “projects.” No persona, and she was more active than any of them.

Takuya had not been present for that meeting in the principal’s office, when Lisa, Tatsuya, and Eikichi had discovered the photographer was a persona-user. She’d been assigned to back up a cub reporter—Mizuno hadn’t thought much of the Joker rumor, it’d be a sidebar at best—who had been down in the courtyard talking to students about the supposedly wandering statue of Takashi Hanya, while she followed a different lead. Maybe she’d wanted to prove something to her mentor, who had war-zone photography under his belt and valued forward thinking above almost anything.

She’d loved Shunsuke Fujii; they’d one day all watch him die together.

No, while they were battling demons upstairs, he’d been trying to ask out Yoko, the second-prettiest girl in Seven Sisters. It was his fourth time trying, and he was proposing just that they walk together through the school’s upcoming festival. She turned him down, even with the wad of bandages wrapped around most of her face; the festival would end up never taking place, but none of them could know that yet. Certainly not the first-year on the baseball team who cornered him by the bike racks, threatening him to stay away from her.

The younger man had an impossible strength, and his arm whirred with the sounds of servos and gears as he sent him skidding across the lot with a single punch. Joker had made his athletic wishes come true, and the rumor had spread that he was a cyborg. Silly or not, Sevens was the breeding ground for curses and the fantastic—they’d said it was true since the day that teacher had fallen into the clock tower’s gears, but suddenly it was truth verifiable, as real as the wind that had been knocked out of him with a punch like steel.

Unbidden, his persona had surged forth—his first persona, Idas, an image burned into his mind forever, what he could only describe as a torpedo in a golden jacket. Its power was strange, terrifying, but somehow familiar; he nearly killed the possessive creep, had to pull the power back within himself. He’d never spoken to Yoko before, weeks ago he couldn’t so much as muster anyone’s attention, but his newfound arm had made of him a monster.

This power, though, had left Takuya feeling as if he might be a monster, as well.

“We need to get moving,” Yukino said finally. “If that... thing, that shadow or whatever it is, goes after the assembly...” None of them needed it explained to them. “Even if it doesn’t, we need to get Lisa and Mizuno-san there right away.”

Lisa wiped at her face. “Right...” She didn’t look ready to smile for an audience and joke about her father. She didn’t look ready to let her horror go, her denial and shock, because sometimes the incoherence of pain was easier than grasping the scope of a new reality. Since Xibalba had taken off, there had been jumpers—there could be no more horrifying way to die, drifting into oblivion, neither living nor dead. Still others roamed in catatonia, wasting into nothing.

Brown laid a kind but awkward hand on Lisa’s shoulder as he passed. He, Mizuno, the other writers and some of the commandos began their ordered descent, stopping for fruitless sweeps at each landing.

Lisa had chosen Takuya; Tatsuya had chosen Jun. It should have all been tied up with a bow, he should have been happy to see his friend wake up.

One of Nanjo’s men lingered by them, as if their presence could be intimidating enough to encourage their flight from the ruined office. Once, Takuya would have been awestruck just at the sight of this man, with his semi-automatic carefully safetied but held ready, his alert posture.

Here was the truth about Takuya Miyashiro, which only months ago he barely remembered about himself: once upon a time, his sister had taken him to a festival at Alaya Shrine. Shiori loved him, but she was a teenager and he was underfoot, and so she’d let him loose to go play. Nothing could be safer than the old shrine, after all. And she was of that age when some days love just wasn’t enough, because Takuya was an absolute handful as a boy.

Takuya’s father had died two years earlier, when he was barely old enough to remember him at all. He’d been stationed out of the country, and there had been an accident. Their mother had never wanted to talk about it. By high school, classmates were spreading rumors that his father had been part of covert operations, because kids will tell each other literally anything to make their lives sound more interesting, to grasp for an ephemeral idea of “adulthood” just out of reach. One informed by manga and the overheard gossip of adults in lieu of experience. All Takuya had known is that his father was gone, and he was angry all the time.

It took his shadow to explain to him that he’d been scared.

He took Lisa’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, and she tried to smile.

Shiori dumped him at the shrine, and how he remembers it is that she did so in annoyance, in exasperation; he kicked a rock and it skittered across the grounds, to where two boys were talking in low voices. Like him, they were in festival sentai masks. The boy in the red mask tensed, but the boy in black just waved.

“Hello! Want to play?”

Yukino looked over Tatsuya’s throat and nodded. “You’ll be fine. We’ve gotta go.” He nodded, but as they all walked towards the stairwell, he stopped, looking back over the wreckage. A blackened shell, unrecognizable slag that was once furniture, the elements rushing through the open wall. His fist tightened. Takuya nodded to Lisa, let her and Hoshi guide each other down as he walked back to the man who had once been his enemy, his friend.

“This is where she’d worked,” Tatsuya hissed through cracked lips, one hand over his neck. “I’d never gotten to come up here and see it.”

He shook his head. “Lisa didn’t work here that often, man. Just when they were meeting with Mizuno-san.”

Tatsuya looked at him like he was stupid, or... no, not stupid. It was a strange face, angry and pitying in equal measure. It was like the old Tatsuya that he’d thought he knew, from school, the one too cool for everyone. “Not Lisa.”

Takuya almost threw a punch. How could anyone _but_ Lisa be on his mind after what had just happened? But he seemed to realize it, shrunk, turned away to watch the broken sprinkler pipe drip water down on a shattered computer monitor.

“Oh, you mean Hanakouji-san? Chikarin?”

He shook his head again. “Forget it.” Then made a weird sound, like a hiccup—was he laughing?

 

***

 

There was bedlam in the streets, as people jostled for a look at the survivors from the strange attack, or accident, or whatever it had been. For people like Yukino, there was something heartening in that, no matter how annoying it was—that people could find a degree of normalcy after the world had ended, such that a scene like this was unusual enough to attract attention. The demon attacks were infrequent enough now that it was like living in the wild, dangerous but a form of coexistence.

For Tatsuya and Lisa, it was horrible. The crushing throngs, the shouts, both of them took involuntary steps backwards when they reached the lobby doors and saw what they had to contend with.

For Mizuno, however, it was an opportunity. The woman had dealt with a number of things she didn’t understand in the last hour, and the mayor’s men had picked her up and dusted her off as though she were a doll that had been knocked over. It was insulting. But a bunch of sniveling passers-by, that she knew how to handle. She was the press, dammit.

Mizuno took a breath and pushed through the revolving door, leading the others chest-first. Most of the Nanjo security team had at least a head on her in height, but they followed her lead as she stomped forward, her pure _aura_ pushing the crowd aside.

“She ain’t resonating, right?” Brown muttered.

Yukino shook her head. “No, she’s always been like this.”

Mizuno ignored them. She knew what people said about her. That she couldn’t get time of day from a man, that she was an aggressive bitch, that her magazine for teenagers was an absolute joke. Well, they said every man had his season, and this would be hers. She was a professional, capable journalist and the best editor in Japan, and now she ran humanity’s last newspaper. People had best get out of the damned way.

And they did. With Mizuno on point, the group made their way slowly but unobstructed by the gawkers, across the wide street and towards the plaza. Brown, Lisa, Yukino, Takuya, Ixquic, Tatsuya, and the security team, each of them scanning not only the crowds but the sky above, the buildings around, looking for a sign of Joker.

There was none.

When they got to the Sumaru TV station, rather than press their luck with the assembling audience outside the front door, Mizuno led them around the side to a loading dock, where Elly and Anna both stood waiting with other members of Nanjo’s team.

“Long day?” Elly put one hand on her hip, smiling broadly at Yukino.

“Don’t get me started,” she muttered.

Brown put on hand each on Takuya and Lisa’s shoulders. “C’mon, showtime.”

Lisa’s fists tightened. “I...”

Takuya smiled softly at her. “C’mon. If he’s coming, we’ll deal with it together.”

She sighed, nodded, and Brown pushed them gently inside the building. Mizuno followed, shaking her head and complaining.

“So,” said Yukino, “Tatsuya-kun. Let’s talk.”

 

***

 

Captain Shimazu, formerly of the Kounan PD, now of the “united” Sumaru City PD, thumbed the focus of his binoculars and shifted his weight. It had been a long while since he’d been green enough to get assigned a stakeout. He’d thought his life had reached a new echelon, one in which he assigned others to do the mind-numbing, muscle-cramping chores that came with police work; but it was a new world, this city in the sky, and there were new rules.

And contracts with demons always had fine print.

He glanced at his watch. The assembly would begin soon, and it was... unpleasant... that he’d been assigned this task, rather than overseeing security for the most important men and women left alive. It felt rather like he was being punished.

It had been impressed upon him again and again, that this surveillance was important. At no point was it made clear _why_ it was important, why following a therapist with no criminal record around day and night was at all useful to the police, the mayor’s office, or the people who _actually_ ran the City of Heaven.

His leg fell asleep; he began punching it.

Across the street from his rooftop vantage, the Climax Theater admitted and released occasional patrons in ones and twos; some enterprising but unimaginative vandal had moved some letters on the marquee so that theater one’s film was advertised as “Merry Christ _mess_ , Mr. Lawrence.” His quarry was still inside, but it hadn’t yet been long enough that she couldn’t be actually watching a damned movie.

He was standing on the outside, and considering it a metaphor. The one saving grace, was not having to listen to an impudent child like Kei Nanjo speak. An infant rocked in a cradle of money and privilege, a boy who’d never struggled in all his life. Carried into _his_ city on a cloud and installed at the top for nothing.

Shimazu, like the others, had prayed for a release from their sinful world. But what they’d so far been given was more like a Sodom of the Skies. It would be on the strongest and purest of them to release the rest from their suffering. The only _moral_ choice.

He made some small notes on his stakeout’s progress, and then returned to watching for the Sonomura woman to emerge into daylight.

 

***

 

The loading dock was eerily quiet, for all the murmuring throngs around the other side of the building. He could almost believe that they were alone in that moment.

Tatsuya looked not to Yukino, who reminded him too much of Maya, in the way her eyes were searching, but instead to Hoshi, who still looked distracted, even if the color had returned to her face. “You should head home.”

“No.” She shook her head, more emphatically than she needed. “I’m not a kid.” Their first meeting, she’d hit him so hard with the flat of her sword that he’d crashed through a bathroom stall and ended up with his ass jammed into a toilet. Why had the seat been up? It was the women’s room, for God’s sake. She bit her lip. “I want to help.”

His shoulders slumped. Who was he to say no? How was it better for someone like Lisa? Or himself? Philemon kept picking children to crusade for him, and they’d royally botched the job the first time through. Him most of all.

“ _I don't know... Shouldn't the adults be the one fooling the kids?”_

“ _No... it's about adults taking responsibility for children's actions...”_

He shook his head, but turned back to Yukino rather than see her expression when he managed to bite the words out. “Just... be careful. I don’t want you to get hurt.” He sighed. But his arm didn’t hurt. “Yukino... you may not believe... well...” He fidgeted. “Maybe you will believe me. You’ve seen as much as I have, by now.” When they’d all been starting out, she’d been the strongest of them, the most assured. She’d fought and loved and hated and lost as much or more as the rest of them, and she’d still been able to walk away.

If Tatsuya had been half as strong as her, how much less damage might he have done?

Anna crossed her arms. “Hey...” to Yukino, “Where do you want me?”

Yukino gave her a sardonic smile, but didn’t say anything.

He hadn’t seen Anna since the clock tower, the second time. And before that, Zodiac. He’d almost forgotten this Anna, her newfound resolve, still buried under six layers of thorns and a face that barely moved below the eyes. He could see it now, though, and he felt like he understood her better now than he had, how every emotion woke slowly in her, like a golem coming to life, unstoppable once finally in motion. Understood how her pain felt like a warm blanket.

On the Other Side, he’d been friends with her; he’d found it alien, then, and suddenly in this moment he wanted to... to talk to her, about how it was painful to talk. It’d be funny, and neither of them would laugh.

She gave him a brief nod, and vanished into the shadows. It occurred to him that even without Joker, without the Masked Circle, Anna had been the most ninja-like person he’d ever met. He wondered if, deep in her living core, the flame that had begun burning again atop Snail Mountain, she thought it was hilarious to do things like this.

“Tatsuya...” Yukino prompted.

“We probably don’t have time for the whole story...” He tried to order his thoughts. “When we thought we’d defeated Him... in the deepest part of Xibalba...” Pause. “Wait... if you all know that we tried to forget... but... you did forget...” He rubbed at his forehead. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Tatsuya-kun...” Her voice was typical Yukino, in that it was hard, that it didn’t have time for this, but soft, so worried about him, about everyone. He remembered, idly, Nanjo handing Tatsuya his sword, speaking of Yukino with an awed respect. This was why. This was how they’d all felt, but maybe didn’t say often enough, with Maya’s radiance blotting out everyone in range. “You’re not making sense. Slow down, start from the beginning.”

“The beginning won’t match, either.” He scowled. “I don’t know if this world is wrong, or if it’s right and I’m wrong.” He remembered the mad anguish buried in Joker’s anger.

“ _The two of you took_ ever-y-thing _from me.”_

Maybe Joker was just... the Tatsuya Suou of _this_ side, this new side. Maybe it was him that didn’t belong. Maybe this time was his fault, too.

As if she could tell he was withdrawing, Hoshi’s hand found his arm. “Hey.” She sniffed. “We knew you were sleeping, right? We watched over you.”

“Yeah.” He tried to breathe. “You said... you said everyone figured out that I was on the Other Side.”

“Eikichi-kun told me that you’d all agreed to forget something important.” Yukino nodded. “Obviously, he couldn’t tell me what that was.”

 

“ _Let’s think positive!”_

 

He winced as if struck. “Yeah. And I couldn’t bring myself to forget. I endangered everyone.”

“Well?” Elly tilted her head. He’d forgotten she was there. “Don’t keep us in suspense, darling.”

Tatsuya rubbed at his eyes. “What’s the point in telling you? You can’t remember her. You probably shouldn’t. It... hurts more... when I see the lack of recognition.” The “her” had slipped out, and all three women had noticed, but of course it made little impression past the obvious. “Even now.” He waved it off, pretended that the hand wasn’t trembling. “Our decision for forget made a new world, in many ways a better world, for many people, but my refusal to forget left a window open for Him to get back in, to wrap his tendrils around everyone and everything a second time. We nearly lost everyone just like we did here, a second time around, but we... but people fixed it. Just barely, but fixed.”

“And you were sent back here because you fixed it?” Hoshi frowned. “Can we repeat whatever you did here?” Damn her for being so hopeful.

“No, you don’t understand.” He shuddered. “ _My not being there_ is part of what fixed it. I didn’t travel through time, like in a movie; I didn’t step into some other dimension.” At least not in that way. “Our world _became_ their world. If everyone had remembered, it would just become _this_ again, or worse. But now I’m here, when we shouldn’t exist. We shouldn’t have met, me and Lisa and the others, because we _unmade our meeting_. But we did, and...” He gestured vaguely towards the inside of the TV studio, where Takuya had gone, but they couldn’t interpret that motion in anyway that made sense. “Do you understand? There would be no fear of their remembering, if this hadn’t happened. But now I’m back here, but everything’s wrong, and everyone remembers everything _but her_. Did she even _exist_? I thought I’d finally get to die, finally accept my punishment, but we’re all here in a world without her.”

Hoshi’s hand slipped away, slowly, as if disappointed.

Yukino turned to Elly. “Did you get all that?”

“...Maybe.” Elly rubbed at her bottom lip with one finely-manicured thumbnail. “I don’t like the implications, either.” She looked up. “But! It _is_ awfully fascinating.”

Yukino groaned.

“Now, now.” Elly nodded to Tatsuya. “I have some ideas, on how to figure this out. Maybe they’re wrong, but it will be a place to start. But none of it will matter if we let these people get hurt.”

This, at least, was something that he could understand. He nodded, firmed up his shoulders. “Let’s go.”

But when Yukino and Hoshi had both passed them, entering the building, Elly stopped him short. “One thing.” She leaned in close, her perfect face hovering by his ear, her perfume smelling like Jun. “Whatever this is... whether it’s real or a dream... we are judged by what we do in the dark. Even a dream’s life matters until one wakes.”

He remembered Kandori in his dream, laughing.

“Still!” She clapped her hands. “No need to think the worst. You’re still young; the future is the true undiscovered country.”

Tatsuya tried not to think of Baofu, and failed.

“Dying isn’t atonement, Tatsuya-kun.” Elly placed one hand on his shoulder, guiding him inside. “Death is escape. Life is atonement, the very chance of it, always.”

 

***

 

Wardrobe and make-up all but lifted Lisa and Mizuno off the ground and carried them away; there was little time left, and both of them were an absolute mess from the battle, albeit for different reasons.

Which left Takuya cut loose, adrift in a corridor, not sure what to do with his hands. Should he, what, patrol for Joker? Stalking around the building with guns drawn would only cause panic. Maybe he should have stayed outside with the others. He wanted to support Lisa, but now he was underfoot, and he’d rather be getting to the bottom of things. He’d always been left out, always come in late.

In the Masked Circle, he’d always volunteer to play the villain. A backpack full of rubber monsters that he’d summon as his minions, even when they played house he’d be the jerk older brother, shoving Eikichi—that last one might be what made him feel guiltiest of all, when he remembered. Sometimes he’d just run laps around the shrine, screaming and waving his arms, until Nishitani-san or her husband would emerge from the trees asking what the fuss was.

He supposed that’s why, for a while, they thought _he_ was Joker.

In truth, he almost was. Anna Yoshizaka, Lady Scorpio, had come to him before everything started. It was weeks before, right before the “disease” had started manifesting, and she’d strolled in, wearing that heavy coat, claiming to Noriko that she wanted to get the make-up homework after her hospital stay. But what she talked with him about instead was the Joker Game. He’d thought it was stupid; Yoshizaka was cool as Hell, but he “didn’t have time for children’s games” (utterly hilarious, in retrospect) and rather than press it, she just walked out. Apparently her choice at Cuss High had felt differently. He’d mostly just thought she’d been making fun of him.

Everyone knew he was an otaku mess. The first time he’d negotiated with a demon by explaining the plot of “Evangelion,” Eikichi had just rolled his eyes.

What was it that his shadow had said? “You’d rather understand every detail of a fiction than turn your gaze upon your own life, because to understand that, you’d need to acknowledge your own terror.” He’d gone from unbridled, raw energy to suffocating restraint and both for the same reasons. Just another boy who missed his dad—what a common trope!

“Takuya.” Steven Silverman appeared at his side, in his finest kimono, powdered and serene.

“Sir!” He bowed.

“I understand that you protected my daughter today.” Steven pursed his lips and nodded. “I’ve had my doubts, but you’re acquitting yourself well.”

He did not raise from his bow. “Thank you, sir!”

When they’d fought, at the end, that tangle of fathers, moaning and calling, Takuya barely remembered the man who slapped against the ground like a wet sack, who asked him if he still missed him.

Steven nodded and continued on. He exhaled.

Everything changed for him, again, when he met the world’s worst detective. Satomi Tadashi was gleefully giggling to himself in a white suit two sizes too big for him, carefully peeling a poster off the outside wall of the Time Castle, and Takuya saw the silhouette, with those two familiar girls to either side, and recognized Lisa instantly.

“Hello, Miyashiro-kun.” A timid girl with a long blue ribbon tied through her hair emerged from the same doorway.

“Oh! Hey!” He and Noriko hadn’t been especially close, but Noriko was the rare student who listened attentively to her class rep, and she’d never teased him. An above-average, if not exceptional student, she’d only seemed comfortable and free out on the track, where she’d been the best runner in second-year—“Best” still being times at least a half-minute behind her senpai. “What are you doing here?”

“Big Sis told me to come right away...” She frowned. “She said it was important.”

He rubbed his chin. “Well. I don’t know if this is the safest place in town or the most dangerous at the moment, but I get her reasoning.” If Lisa was the sort of girl who couldn’t take care of herself—the sort of girl interested in his protecting her at all—he’d probably want her close, if only so that he could ensure her safety himself. But then, when he tried to imagine a Lisa like that, his brain couldn’t quite process it.

How she’d cracked when that thing, Joker, had worn Tatsuya’s face, though—when it called itself Chinyan—that was as close as he’d ever seen her. It twisted his guts. All the more because he couldn’t do a damned thing to help.

“Hey, Katayama-kun...” He rubbed the back of his head. “I know she’s here, watching out for you, but since she can’t be, y’know, right _here_... do you maybe want me to hang around?”

“That would...” Noriko looked down. “That would be nice, actually.”

So he leaned back against the wall, hands in his pockets, and tried not to dwell on the past. Honestly, he was getting as bad as Tatsuya.

 

***

 

He hadn’t been with the others when they’d battled Wang Long Chizuru in the Sumaru TV Station, and so everything but the lobby was entirely new to him. Miss Serizawa had tried explaining the adventure to him later, and she’d said a bunch of stuff about Chinese numerals that had seemed complicated. Eikichi had always talked about their efforts in video game terms—at least, until it had gotten too serious for even him to joke—but they’d actually not had to solve that many puzzles. Which had been good, he hadn’t the head for them.

Only good at two things, after all.

“They’ll be starting, soon.” Elly stopped at an intersection in corridors. She seemed poised, in her element; hard to believe the stories, that they’d all fled down these halls in a panic, a madman with a chainsaw behind. “We should take positions.”

Yukino had gone on ahead, to where the members of the assembly were gathering. Tatsuya only took a moment to consider the potential tactical positions.

“How do I get up above?” He cracked his knuckles, then collected the lighter from his pocket.

Elly gave him an enigmatic smile, then pointed. “Follow the hall that way to the second left, then take the stairs. First door on the right opens to a prop room; There’s access to the lighting grid from there, be silent unless you’ve cause.”

“Good luck!” Ixquic grabbed his elbow, and then he nodded, jogging away. He couldn’t bare her smile, struggling to stay brave, hurt, somehow, by something he’d said.

He could hear their voices recede behind him. “And what’s _your_ story?”

“I’m a reincarnated warrior.”

“Really? Wonderful! I’m an angelic bringer of victory.”

He slammed the stairwell door open and took the steps two at a time. Action centered him. He could cope with things when he had a goal, when he had no time to think.

Even then, the image of the other Tatsuya’s burned face, its perfect match for Sudou’s, lingered in his vision. The Sudou of the other side had screamed, sobbed that he had to lose his face again to match.

The prop room was a disaster of false artifacts; there were hollow foam rocks piled up in a crate, and a shelf was lined with cardboard boxes, overflowing with cigarette cases, dead cell phones, scarves painted with fake blood, dozens of broken pencils, a handful of books. A scatter of weapons leaned against varied corners. He picked up a prop sword, took a few practice swings, and jammed it back in a bucket of sporting implements. It wasn’t worth it.

There were masks hanging, as well. Rubber monster masks, black domino masks, and yes: he lifted the Red Hawk mask, seeing his own eyes in the reflection of its visor.

This was all he was, wasn’t it? A sword, a mask, a lighter. A collection of props disguising a lack of identity. Kandori had been right. Without his promises, he was empty—a shadowman. And he’d broken his promises.

He threw the mask aside and opened the hatch in the floor. This was not a grand theater, but a two-floor studio soundstage—there was only a single thin length of grating to serve as a catwalk amongst the lighting rig. He lowered himself down gently, so as not to shake the fragile dangling platform, and then looked up.

He was not alone. At the other end of the catwalk, Jun Kurosu was standing there, staring at him.

 

***

 

Behind the curtain, in the wings, bouncing from foot to foot, trying to psyche herself up. Standing in the shadows, with Brown off to one side in a folding chair pretending to nap, trying to put her at ease.

Lisa Silverman was having, it could be argued, not the best day.

She was stressed about this stupid introduction _before_ everything had gone to Hell. Naturally, he’d choose that moment to reenter her life. She’d missed him so much, she wanted to hate him.

She’d never be able to, and maybe that was why it was right that she couldn’t have him.

When she was a little girl, her dream had been to grow up and marry Tatsuya Suou. As girlish dreams went, it was hard to fault—for all his problems, for all his weaknesses and his refusal to heal, he was a good man. A _good_ man. He hadn’t wanted to lock Takuya up in the shrine that day.

Takuya had been having one of his “wild days,” and he’d shoved Lisa over, hard. It wasn’t really his fault, they’d been talking about how great Jun’s dad was, how cool he looked, and it hadn’t been fair, he’d been standing right there, and it was the anniversary of the day. They hadn’t known. He hadn’t said, had been afraid to tell them. Takuya had been a child, they all had, he didn’t understand why it hurt worse coming from Lisa. It didn’t make it right, but it was a forgivable act, an innocent sin.

They were always playing pretend—they so rarely took their masks off, and Takuya was always playing the villain, always taking it too far. So they decided to punish him. The reality and the fantasy got screwed up, for just a minute. Tatsuya had said no, and they’d locked him in, too. They didn’t know about the arsonist. Sudou. King Leo.

Lisa got her father to call the police, she knew they hadn’t died. But the shock of it, the guilt, most of them had just... blanked it out. But not Jun. His memories were damaged in a way far more severe.

When Takuya was in junior high, he and his sister had gotten a dog, a shiba inu with silver paws that he called Gin-chan, or Ginny. It wound up following them up the mountain to Caracol, they’d had to watch when it...

Lisa wondered what Sheba and Mee-ho would think of her and Takuya. Or of how she was afraid now, more afraid than she was of punching demons. Of this Joker who had pulled his punches with her, who had been sincere, pained, when he said he loved her, swearing revenge on the men _she_ loved.

A hand met her shoulder. It was the mayor. “On five, walk on out. You’ll be fine.” Kei Nanjo’s glasses reflected the overhead lights: she couldn’t see his eyes. “We will keep everyone safe.”

She nodded, took a deep breath.

Takuya had been afraid to confess until after her _Chinyan_ —her real one—was all but gone. But she felt... stronger, with him. More equal. But every day she wondered how he felt, being a second choice.

Because Tatsuya, at the end of the world, had proved himself the same person he’d been at the beginning of it.

 

***

 

Tatsuya’s mouth moved; nothing came out.

Jun’s smile was so warm, so overjoyed—in that subtle Jun way, soft, not leaping, just... radiating. They each took a few spare steps closer to each other. In the darkness, he looked as he ever had. He didn’t seem real; like seeing him sprawled in Maya’s arms in the depths of Caracol, at his weakest, he was always posed for a painting. Maybe that was why he was staying at Sonomura’s, you could spend your life trying to capture him and never quite grasp hold.

“Welcome home,” he whispered.

“I...” Tatsuya wanted to bolt in terror. He wanted to... to...

Jun held out his sword.

Tatsuya took it in hand, cowed by Jun’s solemn expression in bestowing it. He’d carried it all this time. He remembered, then, Junnosuke Kuroda, appearing at his ancestor’s side. Jun’s _father_ , the tower’s ghost himself, telling Maya the story; of Junnosuke burning the castle down and fleeing into the hills, the final request. Living a life without them, alone. Subservient to their desires even beyond death. His gut ached, his wrist itched.

He almost clicked the lighter, but the sound would echo across the soundstage like a gunshot.

It was Nanjo’s old blade; he attached it to his own belt silently.

 

***

 

“Are you all right?” Elly walked alongside Ixquic as they patrolled the interior corridors. The best choices, a model and a thirteen year old girl, not threatening to anyone who wouldn’t be a threat in turn. Elly would take the lead when choosing a route and then fall back so that the younger girl could plow onward, as though it hid her face.

“...Yeah.” The young girl threw herself forward with every step, as if pushing through walls.

“It was Tatsuya-kun’s story.”

Akari Hoshi clutched at her stomach as she stalked onward.

“Akari-chan...”

Hoshi whirled in place to face her. “He says nobody remembers ‘her,’ but it’s _him_ that doesn’t remember!” She pressed further on her abdomen. “He did it all to save _me_!”

 

***

 

Lisa reached the podium and looked out at the gathered audience. It seemed like half the city was there; beyond standing-room, people were crowded into the aisles, lingering at the doors, children were on laps. The attack across the street and their march through the public had only raised people’s desires for answers.

The expectant look of hundreds of faces barely made an impression. Even at the concert hall in Aoba Park, the very first time, they hadn’t been half as scary as wondering what her friends would think of her. She had an image of the crowd consumed in flames, of this other Tatsuya, the Tatsuya of her childhood dreams, broken and manic, striding through them with his arms outstretched.

She wished Miyabi were here. She’d gone along with Eikichi’s shadow, out of desperation or self-loathing, and at the time Lisa hadn’t understood it. She didn’t know if she now wanted to apologize or beg for help.

(To face a parody of your own dreams, it was like something He would do; she understood that, without ever knowing Maya Amano, of the violent revulsion and existential horror of entering a room and seeing her playful catchphrase, her bulwark against the hole in her heart, her lifeline in the dark, chanted by hundreds as a fascist creed.)

She raised her hand above her head, and in her fakest idol voice, shouted “ _Hiiiiiiiii_!”

Applause, wolf-whistles, the incoherence of those who turned to celebrity to bask like sunflowers.

A side door opened, and Takuya slipped in with Noriko at his side. He gave her a grin. She gripped the sides of the podium and took a deep breath.

 

***

 

Ms. Saeko finally emerged from one of the appointed dressing rooms, looking slightly dazed, queasy. Yukino rushed over to offer an arm of support.

“Oh, Yuki, I’m fine, I’m fine...” She waved her off. “It was just being in the same room as _that man_... I swear, I’d rather date Hanya.”

“Be careful what you say, he’s still out there somewhere.” Yukino wagged her finger, and she laughed.

“You’re right! But seriously...” She shuddered. “I’ve never been around someone like that for so long, and basically alone... he just _emanates_ this... this aura. He was nothing but polite, but it was like the air was sucked right out of the room.”

“Yeah. Kei’s playing a dangerous game.” She nodded, opening the next door for Ms. Saeko. “We’ve got to get you to the soundstage, though...” Saeko Takami had weathered the Day of Ice like a trooper and gone on to keep teaching all the way through Joker and the end of the world. She was the strongest, bravest, kindest person Yukino had known in all her life; that even _she_ was put off said a great deal.

“Well, I trust Kei-kun, and so do you.” It wasn’t even a question. “He’s done so much for this city already. I can’t imagine we’d be teaching these children otherwise.”

“Oh, I’d bet you would be.” She smiled.

“...Maybe.” Ms. Saeko smoothed out her skirt. Unlike many of the others, she hadn’t bothered dressing up. They’d powdered her for the lights, and that had been it.

“You’re as amazing as ever,” Yukino said, and blushed a bit at her forthrightness. Their first meeting was some five years ago, when Ms. Saeko had hunted her down after school, found her popping a Yanqui squat in the alley beside the Yin & Yan. Within a year, she was working there and managing a passing grade.

She stopped short, and Yukino almost crashed into her. “You know, Yuki, you could do it, too.”

Frown. “What?”

She turned, a sly smile working its way from one corner of her mouth towards the center. “Teach. You’d certainly thought about it, before.”

“Oh, well... I...” She blanched. “I mean, I’m not...”

She shrugged. “Well, think about it. A lot of the excuses are gone now, after all. Certifications and tests and affording higher ed. And I’m the one who hires the teachers.”

And with that, she slipped through the door to backstage, leaving Yukino gaping.

 

***

 

From the lighting grid, they could see down to the stage, and out to the audience. It was an impressive vantage, if not necessarily an attractive one. But they were both focused on it now, rather than look at each other. Or maybe that was just him, and Jun could feel his radiating discomfort. He hoped it wasn’t hurtful. He didn’t want to hurt Jun in any more ways than he already had.

Something that often went unremarked upon was that unlike when they were boys, he and Jun didn’t exactly look _alike_ anymore. They’d both had soft, androgynous features back then, but Tatsuya had grown right out of them—his face was still pretty, as Lisa and Maya both had never tired of telling him, but as he’d filled out he’d gotten all angular, hard. When he stood next to Jun, he felt like a hulking beast.

He had a sudden, awful image of Hoshi and Belphegor and pinched his eyes shut to clear it.

Below him, Lisa was beginning her introduction. “Citizens of Sumaru City, it is my honor and pleasure to welcome you to the first community meeting hosted by our interim government.” She paused. “They said I could tell a joke about my dad here, since he’s one of the people who will be up here to answer your questions. But I don’t have any good jokes... things used to be... not the best between us, but this thing that’s happened to all of us, you realize how quickly you can lose the people who, who matter to you.” She sounded a little choked up. His hands slid along the loose rod that served as a makeshift handrail. “It makes me not want to point out he only wears those kimonos so you can’t see how pudgy he’s gotten.”

The crowd roared with laughter. He found even his lip quirk, just a little.

“You know... I really admire you.” Jun didn’t turn to look at him. His voice was hushed, but Tatsuya could hear him perfectly. “Your strength. I... wasn’t strong enough, to not forget.”

His head slowly turned, but Jun was watching Lisa. “You really don’t remember our promise, do you?” His fist gripped the lighter so hard that it hurt.

Jun’s eyes flicked away without speaking. Tatsuya looked down to the watch, which had peeked out of his sleeve.

“ _I don’t have anything to give you in return.”_

“This world is wrong,” he mumbled. “It hurts more than the last one did. I don’t... understand how it hurts more when I have you all back.”

“Tell me where you went.” Jun’s hand was very close to his, as close as it could be without touching.

“I don’t know how.” He shook his head. There was a bead of what might have been sweat at one eye. “I don’t know how to explain it when you can’t remember.”

“I... we waited for you to come home.” Jun’s breath was still. “I didn’t expect you to come back and tell me that this _wasn’t_ home.” He sounded hurt. Was he hurt? Of course he must be. God, what was wrong with him.

It was everything he’d feared from the moment he woke up.

“I didn’t mean...” He dug at his wrist with a fingernail.

“I’m sorry.” Jun let go of the railing and turned. “It’s my fault... I promised you that I’d remember, but I can’t. Everything that’s happened is because of me, because I was too weak. And now you’ve had to carry your burdens without me. I don’t know how I can atone.”

“ _Why, I bet that deep down inside, you actually hate Jun...”_

He gritted his teeth.

 

***

 

“But really, everywhere I’ve gone in this city, every person that I’ve met, either because they’ve come up to me because they knew I was an idol, or just a stranger I passed by, everyone’s had the same story. This isn’t some sort of moral about losing the world being a blessing... that would be disgusting. But in the face of that horror, I’ve seen everyone pick up and move forward, to appreciate what little they have left—or how _much_ they have left, that much more. Humanity survives in this city, and it’s the best of us, right here, holding our loved ones closer.”

There were assorted claps and cheers, but the assembly as a whole was hushed. Lisa wasn’t entirely sure she believed her own words. It had been the worst of humanity that had caused this, the insatiable hunger for misery which had spread the rumors, the darkness in their souls that had given Him the power to annihilate the world.

But if she couldn’t believe it, why fight at all?

Wasn’t it the best of humanity that had allowed them all to find each other again, when the pain and the guilt had caused them to forget? Wasn’t it embracing Jun, Takuya being drawn to Mu to unite with people he thought he hated, Yukino standing up again after Shunsuke was lost, Anna turning from the brink, whatever the Hell had happened in Mikage-Cho, wasn’t that the proof?

A year ago, Lisa Silverman had been strung out in a booth in the back of Club Zodiac as an old man ran his hand up her thigh, and she hadn’t even cared. Now she wanted to live and to love. Her father was embarrassing and he didn’t understand her at all, but they really loved each other, they always had. She couldn’t ever hate Jun, and she couldn’t hate Tatsuya, either.

This other Tatsuya, she knew deep down, she had to have made it herself. She didn’t know how, but for it, him, to be so obsessed, it was only a reflection of what she was. Whatever had happened to him, maybe it could have happened to her. Wasn’t that what her shadow had been, possessive, aggressive, willing to kill him to have him?

She looked over at Takuya, watching her proudly, and then to the crowd.

“...And that’s why I’m so happy to stand here today, to introduce these men and women who have given of themselves to hold the chaos at bay.” She felt like she was going to smash the podium in her grip. “I am proud to be a citizen of this, the last city, with all of you. And I hope you find what I have.” She leaned in. “My boyfriend has asked me to marry me, and I couldn’t be happier.”

The crowd erupted in a standing ovation. Takuya’s jaw dropped. So did her father's.

 

***

 

"She's doing it to _him_ , now." He leaned forward in disbelief. “What is she _doing_?”

Jun smiled softly. “That’s a beautiful thing; I’m so proud of...”

“No... she’s _baiting_ him.” Tatsuya’s eyes widened. “Joker. She’s luring him out.”

Jun reeled back—which for Jun, meant his head snapped about three degrees. “You’ve seen him? Is he... am I...”

“No.” Tatsuya shook his head, focused on her. “I’m Joker. I’m in love with Lisa.” As soon as he said it, his eyes widened, and he turned to Jun, who looked as if he’d punched him. “No... I didn’t mean...”

 

***

 

Anna Yoshizaka stood on the roof of the Sumaru TV studios building, her scarf spooled out behind her in the wind, her fists clenched.

In her pocket, a handheld radio relayed to her the audio from inside, as Kei Nanjo took the podium. “Thank you; I’m willing to admit that it’s a bit difficult to follow that up—you’ll forgive me if I don’t make any startling confessions.” He paused for light chuckles. “Before we begin, I’d like to address immediately the incident that occurred just across the street no more than an hour ago.”

She tuned it out. Yukino had told her the truth—that Joker had indeed come back, that he’d attacked the _Coolest_ office and had been fought to a standstill. Which had confirmed her greatest fear and Jun’s, had told her she was right to call Noriko to the TV station where she’d be safest. The only two people she truly cared about.

Anna’s parents had pushed her to run; or rather, they’d pushed her to keep at it, to catch every practice, to beat her times. She loved running, loved it so much she’d wanted to die without it, but the competition and the practices and everything that came with it had been killing her. She couldn’t see it until she was outside of it.

Her body in motion was something, a feeling, a lightness; she didn’t think when she ran. But the team events, the clipped magazine photos of famous athletes, the pride in holding up a trophy, that was all Noriko, who’d been so overjoyed to find a place to belong, where they respected her for being good at something. For Anna, it meant no choices, no friends, no part-time job, no other interests. It wasn’t until she lost the ability to run altogether that she could tell the difference, only when she lost both could she see which one she longed for. Not that it mattered, because without the other, her future had fallen out immediately.

Her parents had died when the world ended. She didn’t miss them, but she never said it aloud, because it would make Noriko cry.

She was trying to get better about caring for others, she really was. Her relationship with Jun was complicated, but she respected Suou and the rest, she knew what they’d done for her. It was just... difficult, to form those connections.

The least she could do was things like this, stand atop the city and watch over them, so they could at least be happy without her.

The crowds below were still milling, even though they hadn’t been able to cram any further into the soundstage. From up here, she could only think about the Cuss High masquerade, which was a thing she tried not to do often.

Nanjo, over the radio: “As many here may know, I had only just returned to my home nation from study abroad in England when the events transpired which have led us to this moment. While obviously fortuitous for me, more than that I remain grateful that, as with so many, I was able to be around those I cared for most when the end transpired for so many others. It is due to their strength that I stand before you now, both in this position and in life. It is to no one's surprise that I come from a place of considerable privilege. And I would never ask those who have had less to hold sympathy for those who had more. But it _is_ true that the cocoon that wealth afforded me kept away not only the troubles of many, but also things that many take for granted. Each of us, I believe, are contained within our own cocoons—some of circumstance, some of our own making—and it is not only our own strength which frees us, but the strength of others. Even this flying city of ours is a cocoon that, together, we can molt from in time; we shall spread our wings together, as the human race, if we join together in service.”

It was a pretty hackneyed speech, Anna thought. He’d probably thought it was very clever, but only about two dozen living people were going to hear all that butterfly imagery and make anything of it but melodrama.

Anna had a hard time remembering a time when she’d felt so young and free that she’d played the Persona Game. It had to have happened, but those days seemed forever lost to her.

“I’d like to introduce you, now, to those people who have pledged to join together with _me_ in that cause, that we can address your concerns and begin a dialogue about how best to move forward in that selfsame metamorphosis as a community.”

“He’s still going with it,” she mumbled. “Unreal.” Anna took the radio out of her pocket to thumb the volume up--

\--And an explosion of flame erupted beside her, launching her across the rooftop. She cried out, landing hard on one shoulder even as the radio skittered over the edge of the rooftop, falling to the street far below.

She looked up to see Tatsuya Suou, holding a sword at the ready, one side of his face a mass of burns that looked all-too-familiar.

“Helloooo, little bird.” Tatsuya—Joker—grinned. “Cheep cheep!”

 

***

 

Below, the members of Nanjo’s appointed cabinet came to the stage for their introductions. Steven Silverman, who had worked in the currency exchange, to deal with matters of resource allocation. Ms. Saeko, in charge of education. Mizuno, information and entertainment. Rumormonger Toro, relations between the appointed government and the citizenry.

“It’s _another_ me,” Tatsuya said, slapping his own chest. “Summoned with rumors, or some other design of His, it’s obsessed with her, I didn’t mean...”

Jun smiled shyly. “It’s all right. It... seeing you that way... so eager to prove...” Jun took a step closer.

Tatsuya’s mouth was dry. He saw the smile Jun gave seeing him, truly seeing him again, when they’d freed him in Caracol. He saw Jun’s reflection in a bridal store window.

“ _Your personalities are different, but maybe that’s why you two draw each other together like shadows...”_

“ _I mean, you’re practically me. And I’m you... No matter what happens, we’re gonna keep our promise to each other! Forever and ever!”_

“I’m the one that failed, Jun...” he whispered, “I broke our promise, even if you don’t remember it.” It might even somehow be worse, this way. He was so close, now. It was beyond trite to think “he smelled like flowers,” but it was overpowering.

“I don’t know how to forgive a sin that I don’t remember.” Jun shook his head. “But I know that I want to.”

He let go of the lighter in his pocket.

Jun leaned in further.

“Hey!” shouted a voice from the crowd. “How long are these appointments? We want a mayor, not a new emperor!”

Nanjo leaned into the mike. “Sir, your concern is understandable, but we must have order. Our goal is to hold the first official elections in three months’ time, once we’ve settled and urgent matters are addressed. Please, we will take questions from the floor in an orderly fashion once the introductions are complete. Now: in matters pertaining to security, both human- and demon-related, and the overall safety and welfare of the citizenry, I’d like to introduce Chief Togashi of the Sumaru City police department and General Sugawara, formerly of the SDF.”

Tatsuya whipped his head around from Jun as the police chief helped the coughing general to their seats in line, leaving one space open, next to Nanjo’s.

“No.” Tatsuya gripped the rail. “No, no, no...”

Jun pulled his hand back before he’d even realized he’d been reaching for him. “What is it?”

“He can’t be doing this.” He shook his head. “No.”

“Finally,” Nanjo said from down below, “though he likely needs no introduction, our final member, a man who has long been part of our government, and who we hope will impart to us his wisdom in these days going forward. Our former justice minister, Tatsuzou Sudou.”

And then the old man just... walked out onto the stage to take his seat. Many in the audience stood for him; he moved slowly, using his cane for support, dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the day Tatsuya had killed him the first time.

His thumb lifted the seppa of his blade.

“Tatsuya...” Jun looked panicked. “What are you doing? You can’t!”

He stared at Sudou. He thought about Sugimoto and Kandori and Wang Long Chizuru, thought of Shiori and the people of Smile Mall, thought of Todoroki and Hanya and Okamura and his own people aboard the _Nichirin-maru_ , of King Leo and of the world coming apart as it had here.

He thought of Jun’s father and Baofu.

He vaulted the rail, dropping down to the stage below. The crowd shrieked.

People scattered even as the parts of the audience crashed backwards in a panic. Togashi was quick to react, but Tatsuya was quicker, kicking him backwards in his chair before he could get the pistol unholstered; the chair toppled, giving Tatsuya enough time to bring the sword around to Sudou’s throat...

...but Nanjo had been even faster, blocking his blade with his own. He hadn’t even see Nanjo’s sword before this—where had he been hiding it?

“That’s my blade you’re holding, Suou-san.” Nanjo gave him a cold look. “Are you to use it to destroy everything we’ve built?”

“Better than what will be left if you let this man live,” he spit out, glaring at Tatsuzou, who hadn’t blinked, hadn’t flinched, even with two crossed katanas right before his neck.

“I might have explained things, if you hadn’t terrified a roomful of innocent people.” Nanjo was holding the blade with only one hand, and Tatsuya had his with two, and he couldn’t move it. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“I _will_ kill him.”

“Be grateful your back is turned to the crowd,” Toro muttered off to one side.

“Tatsuya-kun?” murmured Ms. Saeko.

“Boy, what are you doing?” Mr. Silverman asked in horror.

It occurred to Tatsuya, then, that in the post-apocalyptic flying saucer of Xibalba, many people now carried weapons. That half the crowd might well have bought guns from Parabellum, and were training them on him now. That he’d become a madman in the eyes of nearly everyone he knew, that none of them knew that this man had to die here, now, while the chance existed; that nobody in Sumaru City was safe with him alive. And Tatsuzou _knew_ , was utterly confident in his invincibility in that moment.

Sudou’s dead eyes finally moved to regard his face. They were unimpressed.

Maybe it was for the best, he told himself. He’d do the right thing here, let them gun him down, and it would be done and over with. Apollo couldn’t save him from _this_.

Maybe Joker could take his place. They could get through to him, let him live the life he’d lost.

His wrist tightened, and he prepared to...

There was a click, and he looked up. Katsuya Suou was standing there, having emerged from the shadows in the offstage wing, his P230JP aimed between Tatsuya’s eyes.

“Drop the sword.”

“Brother?” he let slip.

Katsuya’s amber glasses reflected the lights from above, where Jun was standing, watching. “You are _not_ my brother.” He squared off his stance, his gun steady. “Drop the sword, or I _will_ fire.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT: It's brother against brother, as Anna battles Joker - alone! Plus: three girls have a date with destiny, Takuya reacts to Lisa's surprise announcement, and Tatsuya and Jun come to a fateful decision! The Masked Circle reunites in: "The Day The Clown Cried!"


End file.
